Ever notice that every blockbuster movie has the same fundamental pieces? A hero, a journey, some conflicts to muck it all up, a reward, and the hero returning home and everybody applauding his or...

San Francisco, California, and the Mission of San Juan BautistaDid you leave your heart in San Francisco? Want to take a tour of Vertigo's shooting locations? No problem.Foggy, beautiful San Franci...

Onward and UpwardExcept for two key scenes, Vertigo's story is told in a chronologically linear way, despite all its twists and turns. The exceptions to this rule are (1) Scottie's dream sequence a...

Psychological Thriller In addition to using many of the conventions of melodrama, Vertigo features Hitch's famed techniques for building suspense and probing character. This makes the movie into mo...

Note that Vertigo is the name for Scottie's symptom, not his disease. The latter is "acrophobia," but imagine a film with that for its title. (Sounds too much like "arachnophobia"—and eek). It wo...

Vertigo's ties up its story in a brutal sequence followed by a very ambiguous ending. We'd shout "Spoiler alert!" but we know you've watched this film diligently at least twice and are reading this...

PGVertigo is officially rated PG. There's not a lot of blood or guts or sex, which is what gets the MPAA folks going. However, the film's too much of a sophisticated psychological study to be...