Matrixston
Wow! Such a good movie.
Acensbart
Excellent but underrated film
Kaelan Mccaffrey
Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.
dvdbvvmn
I was going to buy this but decided to rent it instead from my local library and now I am glad I did."Psycho" is a masterpiece and I wasn't expecting a distracting story about Alma.It is a fun film but Hitchcock fans - beware. Don't expect too much.
jc-osms
I've already seen "The Girl", the controversial BBC film starring Toby Jones which centred on Hitchcock's relationship with his leading lady Tippi Hedren during the making of "The Birds". This Hollywood movie takes us back another couple of years to the fraught creation of his slashterpiece "Psycho" and stars Anthony Hopkins as Hitch and Helen Mirren as his diminutive wife / muse / screenwriter / sparring partner Alma Reville. It's fair to say that while this characterisation of the great director is less jaundiced than the cruel manipulator depicted in "The Girl", it's still very much a warts and all portrait we get here.However, whilst not denying the obsessive / eccentric / warped (take your pick ) side of Hitchcock's nature, a perhaps uneasy balance is struck giving at least a more balanced view of this obviously complex, driven man. So yes, he is depicted as voyeuristic, creepily looking through his secret spy-hole as Vera Miles undresses, temperamental (natch!) as he loses himself while directing "Psycho's" famous shower scene and jealous as he suspects Alma of having an affair with handsome, suave, screenwriter Whitfield Kemp. But these are balanced out to a degree by his portrayal as an avuncular old man with a taste for cotton candy in his playful scenes with Janet Leigh, played by Scarlett Johansen, his staunch support for Alma, always crediting her for her input to their marital and creative relationships and of course his genius as a director making a landmark movie.I've read a number of books on Hitchcock and so got most of the situations shown here, but I didn't go along with all of the director's choices. It seemed a bit much for one thing to have Hitchcock actually haunted by the supposed inspiration for the original "Psycho" novel by Robert Bloch, the American murderer Ed Geins, but this was balanced out by a fine scene where we see Hitchcock "conducting" the shower scene in the foyer at the film's premiere as he hears the audience's terrified screams from inside.Whilst not denying the talent of the A-list cast, it's clear that neither Hopkins or Mirren resemble Hitch and Alma and for all he's a celebrated mimic I didn't think Hopkins got Hitchcock's rich vocal delivery. I also didn't think enough room was given to important subsidiary characters, particularly his screenwriter Joe Stefano who gets the one-scene-and-gone treatment. One also suspects some of the anecdotes here are apocryphal even while I accept some of them may have started with Hitchcock himself. I did enjoy the backstage scenes especially the staging of key scenes in the movie.Well acted and staged, this movie struck me as being a little light on facts and heavy on legend and so lacking a little depth and some truth. By the end though I still couldn't particularly differentiate between Hitchcock the family man and the directorial genius, which might have been the intention anyway.Well, I guess it's only a movie as he once famously said.
TheLittleSongbird
'Hitchcock' had real potential to be great, being a biopic on one of the greatest and most influential directors ever and with such a great cast. It could have been much better and is an uneven film, but is a better Hitchcock biopic than 'The Girl' from the same period.It looks great for starters. The cinematography is sumptuous and colourful, and the costume, set and production design and scenery are both eye-catching and evocative. Danny Elfman's score has a lot of atmosphere but also a liveliness and whimsy, even including a chilling and very well used nod to the iconic score from 'Psycho'.A very heavily up Anthony Hopkins makes a valiant effort as Hitch, and it is a spirited, gleefully relished and well-studied characterisation that is much more subtly written than how Hitch was written in 'The Girl' (though in that Toby Jones did do very well indeed with what he was given). Helen Mirren cuts an enigmatic and firm yet sympathetic presence as wife Alma. In support, coming off particularly well are Scarlett Johanssen's spot-on Janet Leigh and Toni Collette who is always good even in material beneath her. While under-used, the Anthony Perkins of James D'Arcy is also ideal casting.Coming off less well are Danny Huston's pretty irritating Whitfield Cook, Ralph Macchio's too old and jarringly too modern-looking Joseph Stefano (kept seeing the Karate Kid rather than Stefano, which really took me out of the film) and Jessica Biel who also feels miscast as Vera Miles, a case of recognisable name and star quality over whether they fit the character or period or both (neither of which Biel does).'Hitchcock's' storytelling is also uneven and unfocused, likewise with the direction which badly struggles with the balancing of plot strand and tone shifts. 'Hitchcock' fares well in the making of 'Pyscho' and Hitch's belligerent reaction to 'North By Northwest's' success, which is fascinating and there should have been much more of it, and in the strong and quite touching chemistry between Hopkins and Mirren.It however underwhelms badly in the very unconvincingly written and unlikely love triangle, which sees Alma falling for Whitfield Cook, a big problem when that has more screen time than the story elements 'Hitchcock' does well in. And also in the tonally odd, padded out (they were clearly there for padding too) and out of place scenes with Ed Gein which was an attempt to bring a fantasy element to the film, and a ghoulish one, but it was woefully misjudged (a shame because Michael Wincott is eerily good as Gein, so much so that if a film is made about Gein in the future Wincott should be up for serious consideration to play him).Some of the dialogue is clunky and not just underuses characters that would have made the film even more interesting (Perkins definitely should have been in the film longer) but the way Alma is written can be considered a character assassination, practically hero-worshipping her and while not vilifying Hitch necessarily there is the very strong and blatant implication that he was lazy, not as clever as he clearly was to make so many great films and that he would not have had the success he had without Alma. The way the characters are written are sketchy and one-dimensional, and despite so much promise one does question the film's point.All in all, intriguing enough but very uneven. 5/10 Bethany Cox
Brigid O Sullivan (wisewebwoman)
Truly sad, this dreck of a movie with its all star cast of note just begging for a decent script and lacking, sadly, the real lowdown on the making of that marvellous movie, "Psycho".Instead we get the puffery of an inflated soap opera with Alfred and Alma at odds with each other in their "love story" of his and hers jealousies.No mention at all of the child they had together. And Alma's role is a complete distortion of the reality of her superb editing and script approval and his directorial genius. Instead we see her investing her time, chastely, with a losing hack writer. While Hitch impotently googley-eyes his leading ladies.A bonus: an unbelievably cloying finale to this feast of clichés hammers the "whatever" point home. Dishonouring each of them equally.A brilliant cast wasted, clumping wetly through this simplistic treatment of one of cinema's greats.1/10. Avoid.
