Cape Town’s Good Film Society presents this Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece, on at the Labia Theatre at 20h15 tonight.

Recently voted in Sight and Sound’s definitive poll as the greatest film ever made (the only film to surpass Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane in many a decade), come to this Sunday’s one-off screening and decide for yourself if it’s worthy of the accolade!

Vertigo is the spellbinding tale of an ex-policeman with a fear of heights, Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), who is hired by an old friend to investigate his wife (Kim Novak). But it’s no ordinary case – the woman is suspected of being possessed by the malignant spirit of a suicide victim. As the mystery leads to a spiral into paranoia and obsession, Scottie is forced to encounter the most painful truth: He has fallen in love with a woman who may not exist. Stylistically breathtaking, intellectually complex and profound, the film is a startlingly experimental exploration of desire, a psychological spider-web woven with unusual compassion by the master of nightmares. With this touchstone of psychological thrillers – his most personal masterpiece – Hitchcock defined not only a genre, but an entire era of filmmaking and art. 

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One of the two or three best films Hitchcock ever made, this is the most confessional, dealing directly with the themes that controlled his art – Roger Ebert

Hitchcock’s masterpiece to date and one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema has yet given us – Robin Wood

One of the landmarks–not merely of the movies, but of 20th-century art – Dave Kerr, Chicago Reader

Why is this movie Hitchcock’s masterpiece? Because no movie plunges us more deeply into the dizzying heart of erotic obsession – David Ansen, Newsweek

Hitchcock’s rich and strange fable of love lost, and lost again, makes the case for him as a grand experimental artist who labored in genre cinema – Bill Weber, Slant Magazine