The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

68. 1958 - Vertigo

Vertigo Jimmy Stewart
Paramount Pictures

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.

 
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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.