The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

75. 1951 - Strangers On A Train

Strangers On A Train
Warner Bros. Pictures

Honourable Mentions: Ace in the Hole, Scrooge, The Thing from Another World

Strangers on a Train tends to sit just outside of the all-timer Hitchcock bracket, but there's a strong argument that it shouldn't. The dynamite premise, for one - of a chance encounter with a stranger hatching a plan to commit the perfect murders - is among the best the Master of Suspense ever had to play with, while the fairground-set finale proves to be just as tense as those found in the likes of North by Northwest or Rear Window.

Hitchcock was also able to draw upon a wealth of collaborative experience for the production, with noir author Raymond Chandler adapting the script from a Patricia Highsmith thriller published the previous year. The resulting material couldn't have been better suited to Hitchcock's sensibilities, with happenstance horror by this point the director's bread and butter.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.