7. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck - The Tourist
Perhaps the most apparent send up to Hitchcock on this list is The Tourist. It features the most famous of any Hitchcock story element: the wrong man. It's about Johnny Depp as Frank, an American tourist in Venice who is drawn in to a game of cat-and-mouse when a mysterious beauty named Elise (Angelina Jolie) decides to make people believe he's someone named Alexander Pearce. Pearce is wanted by both Scotland Yard and some gangsters he stole money from. The film even features the most iconic of all Hitchcock elements, the macguffin. The best thing that can be said about The Tourist is that it tries, and boy does it try hard. The film suffers from two major flaws, however. The first is that Hitchcock, even at the height of his popularity, was always on the fringes. The Academy never honored him with a single Best Director trophy (though he was nominated four times) and he even struggled to get Psycho made, which was the pinnacle of his career. How this relates to The Tourist's shortcomings is that von Donnersmarck has crafted a thriller that is notoriously mainstream, from its conventional soundtrack (the closing credits are set to Muse's Starlight, one of their more mainstream songs) to its star lineup. It has heart, but it's too much to be something even close to classic Hitch. The other, and equally as important flaw, is that it's incredibly boring. It moves at a snail's pace and the suspense lacks tension. Hitchcock altered a stairway to give it a taller and thinner appearance. He could create anxiety from the mundane. These are the things modern directors need to grasp if they want to be Hitchcock.