Hard as it may be to believe of a Hitchcock, it doesn’t arouse suspense, which is, of course, what justifies and transforms the sadism that lies at the heart of every thriller. Here the sadism is all too nakedly, repellently present.

| Aug 15, 2022

There’s a fair amount of beak-based eye trauma.

| Aug 1, 2022

Hitchcock prolongs his prelude to horror for more than half the film, playing with audience suspense with comedy and romance while he sets his stage. The horror when it comes is a hair-raiser ...

| Mar 28, 2017

The true genius of the film, based on a 1952 short story by Daphne du Maurier, is the way Hitchcock makes the malevolent birds seem like manifestations of his characters' mental unease.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 29, 2015

Drawing from the relatively invisible literary talents of Daphne DuMaurier and Evan Hunter, Alfred Hitchcock has fashioned a major work of cinematic art, and "cinematic" is the operative term here, not "literary" or "sociological."

| Jan 18, 2013

Few films depict so eerily yet so meticulously the metaphysical and historical sense of a world out of joint.

| Oct 9, 2012

Hitch's much misappreciated follow-up to Psycho is arguably the greatest of all disaster films -- a triumph of special effects, as well as the fountainhead of what has become known as gross-out horror.

| Oct 9, 2012

The movie flaps to a plotless end.

| Oct 7, 2008

Genuinely disturbing thriller classic from the master of suspense.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 21, 2007

Beneath all of this elaborate feather bedlam lies a Hitch cock-and-bull story that's essentially a fowl ball.

| Sep 21, 2007

Alfred Hitchcock's most abstract film (1963), and perhaps his subtlest, still yielding new meanings and inflections after a dozen or more viewings.

| Sep 21, 2007

It's fierce and Freudian as well as great cinematic fun, with ample fodder for the amateur psychologist following up on Hitch's tortuous involvement with his leading ladies.

Full Review | Jun 24, 2006

Unmistakably, one of the master's best.

| Jan 1, 2000

Mr. Hitchcock and his associates have constructed a horror film that should raise the hackles of the most courageous and put goose-pimples on the toughest hide.

| Jan 1, 2000