10 Best Anti-Valentine's Day Movies

Is there any anti-romantic movie held in higher regard than Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 classic? It may have been widely hailed by critics as one of the greatest films ever made, and a time-honoured favourite that just about everyone's seen at least once; but Vertigo is still a supremely grim piece of work.

It's framed as a standard detective thriller, with James Stewart as Scottie Ferguson, a good cop forced into early retirement when on-the-job trauma leaves him stricken with the condition of the title. However, the real meat of the film is in Scottie's ensuing obsession with a woman (Kim Novak) he is hired to watch - and, following her death, the lengths he goes to make another woman look just like her.

While Scottie's fixation on Madeleine/Judy might be played as a standard, healthy feeling of love, there's surely no getting around the weird and unsavoury it all gets, with his insistence on turning 'Judy' into the thing he wants her to be. That's not love: it's control, ownership, literal objectification.

The fact that this whole scenario directly echoes Hitchcock's own well-documented fixation on beautiful blondes, and the controlling demands he made of his leading ladies, is doubtless a key part of why Vertigo is now often considered his definitive film.

But given its thoroughly creepy overtones, it's certainly doesn't make it the best choice for a date movie - unless it's chosen as a deliberate 'up yours' to Valentine's conventions.