Hitchcock

The legendary director Alfred Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins, The Silence of the Lambs) and his wife, Alma Reville (Helen Mirren, The Queen) are shunned by Hitch's production company and so they move into self-financing following the success of North by Northwest in an attempt to bring the audience a "nasty piece of work." That nasty piece of work is the iconic and insurmountably influential Psycho.

From this film I really took one positive and one not so. The great thing about it, for me and for which I've seen it, in other places criticized was the mentioning, but not dwelling on, the areas of the story that everyone knows so well. There's about thirty seconds at the beginning where Hitch sits about wondering what to do before Robert Bloch's manuscript shows up. The discussion of when to kill off Mrs Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johannson, Avengers Assemble) was prompt, well managed and over some scrumptious toast.

This left range for something else to go on, which in itself was probably a good thing, but didn't totally work for the movie. While all the preparation and production of Psycho was going in the background, the story we were really getting was that of a breaking relationship between the genius behind so many great pieces of cinema, and her husband who takes all the credit. The negative aspect to was in the way it reminded me of The Iron Lady. It seemed like the story of Alma and Hitch could have been told, and be interesting without being those two particular characters. All-in-all, it just about pulled it off.

The truly unappealing quality to this film was the performances. With the cast it contained, this film promised some loving and well-crafted portrayals and delivered caricatured silliness. I wasn't as impressed by Sir Anthony as everyone else, and that's a problem in a film about such a big character. I'd far rather have seen Toby Jones (The Girl).

If you were excited about it coming out, or you showed some general interest in it, I'd recommend you go and tell me if I'm wrong or not.