The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

68. 1958 - Vertigo

Honourable Mentions: Ashes and Diamonds, The Big Country, Touch of Evil

As a title, "Vertigo" is one of Alfred Hitchcock's most instructive. One of four collaborations between actor James Stewart and the British director, but arguably their best, the film is both disorienting and appropriately precarious, with Stewart once again excelling in the role of an ordinary man thrust into a typically Hitchcockian story of suspense, intrigue, and peril, as a former San Francisco police detective wrestling with trauma while plunging into a private assignment.

Like North by Northwest after it, Vertigo affords Hitchcock plenty of opportunities to capture the United States in all its larger-than-life glory, with the San Fran setting being used to full effect through set-pieces at notable locales like the Golden Gate Bridge and the Mission San Juan Bautista.

Add to that Hitchcock's pioneering filmmaking techniques (namely, the introduction of the Dolly Zoom to the directorial repertoire), an iconic opening titles sequence and poster developed by Saul Bass, plus one of Stewart's most layered and fascinating post-war performances, and you have another seminal effort in a filmography chock-full of them.