Alfred Hitchcock's career spanned more than five decades, during which he directed more than 50 films, many of them indisputable classics: Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho, among others. In A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks with the Master of Suspense, authors Jim McDevitt and Eric San Juan provide a comprehensive examination of Hitchcock's film-to-film development, spanning from...

The films of Alfred Hitchcock are appreciated for a variety of reasons, including the many memorable villains who menace the protagonists. Unlike so many of cinema’s wrongdoers, the Hitchcock villain was often a complex individual with a nuanced personality and neuroses the common person might not be able to relate to, but could at least understand. If such figures did not always elicit sympathy from the audience, they still possessed characteristics that were oddly appealing. And frequent...