Alfred Hitchcock
British filmmaker (1899–1980)
A director's score is the sum of their films' composite canon scores — methodology.
- Born
- August 13, 1899 · Leytonstone
- Died
- April 29, 1980 · Bel Air
- Nationality
- United Kingdom, United States, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
- Work
- film director, film producer, actor, television producer
The most canonized director in the data
By raw canonical weight, no director rivals Hitchcock. Across five decades and fifty-odd features he built the largest shelf of individually canonized films in cinema — and he did it almost entirely inside commercial genre filmmaking, without a single competitive Oscar for directing (five nominations, zero wins, and an honorary award he accepted with the complete speech: "Thank you... very much indeed"). The gap between the Academy's contemporaneous verdict and his standing in every retrospective measurement is the widest of any major American career, which makes his page a controlled experiment in what different canonical sources actually measure.
The peak of the shelf is the 1954–1960 run, possibly the strongest six years any director has recorded: Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960), with The Wrong Man and To Catch a Thief as the off-cycle output. Vertigo is the exemplary case study. A commercial disappointment in 1958, pulled from circulation for years by rights issues, it climbed the Sight & Sound poll decade by decade until, in 2012, it dethroned Citizen Kane at #1 — the most famous changing-of-the-guard in canon history — and holds #2 in 2022. Critics vindicating an obsessive, morbid romance the 1958 audience didn't want: that trajectory, more than any single film, is what "the canon moves" means.
What the French saw first
Hitchcock's canonization was itself a historical event. In the 1950s, the young critics of Cahiers du Cinéma — Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, soon to become the New Wave — insisted that this English entertainer was one of cinema's great artists, against the consensus of Anglo-American criticism. Truffaut's 1966 book-length interview Hitchcock/Truffaut completed the operation and remains the founding document of auteurist criticism; the "MacGuffin," the cameo, suspense-versus-surprise — his working vocabulary became film theory's vocabulary. Every ranking on this page, ordered by our composite score, descends from an argument French critics won seventy years ago.
Films in our library, ranked
Ranked by composite canon score across 20+ authoritative lists, awards and polls — our ordering, with every placement citing its evidence on the film's page.
- 1
1958 · United States · mystery, thriller, drama
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #6 · AFI 100 (2007) #9
5.1611 citations - 2
1960 · United States · thriller, horror, mystery
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #31 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #46 · AFI 100 (2007) #14
4.0114 citations - 3
1954 · United States · crime, mystery, thriller
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #38 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1955 #5 · AFI 100 (2007) #48
2.7911 citations - 4
1963 · United States · adventure, horror, mystery
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1963 #2 · Sarris's annual top 10 1963 #1 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1963 #4
2.588 citations - 5
1940 · United States · mystery, drama, romance
Oscar Best Picture winner 1940 · National Film Registry (inducted 2018) · Empire 500 (2008) #318
2.356 citations - 6
1959 · United States · crime, thriller, mystery
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #45 · AFI 100 (2007) #55 · AFI 100 (1998) #40
2.159 citations - 7
1941 · United States · mystery, romance, thriller
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1947 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1941 · NYT Best 1,000 Movies
1.845 citations - 8
1946 · United States · thriller, film-noir, drama
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #133 · TIME All-TIME 100 · National Film Registry (inducted 2006)
1.819 citations - 9
1943 · United States · thriller, film-noir, drama
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1946 #3 · National Film Registry (inducted 1991) · NYT Best 1,000 Movies
1.145 citations - 10
1938 · United Kingdom · thriller, comedy, crime
BFI Top 100 British films #35 · Empire 500 (2008) #268 · NYT Best 1,000 Movies
1.036 citations - 11
1935 · United Kingdom · thriller, mystery, crime
BFI Top 100 British films #4 · Criterion Collection spine #56 · Rosenbaum's Essential Cinema
0.923 citations - 12
1940 · United States · thriller, crime, film-noir
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1940 · Criterion Collection spine #696 · Edgar Wright's 1,000 favorite movies
0.834 citations - 13
1945 · United States · mystery, film-noir, drama
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1945 · NYT Best 1,000 Movies · Criterion Collection spine #136
0.783 citations - 14
1976 · United States · crime, mystery, comedy
Kehr's annual top 10 1976 #1 · Sarris's annual top 10 1976 #9 · Rosenbaum's Essential Cinema
0.763 citations - 15
1972 · United Kingdom · thriller, crime, horror
Sarris's annual top 10 1972 #2 · NYT Best 1,000 Movies · Siskel's annual top 10 1972 #8
0.754 citations - 16
1956 · United States · drama, film-noir, crime
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1957 #4 · Edgar Wright's 1,000 favorite movies · Rosenbaum's Essential Cinema
0.653 citations - 17
1951 · United States · film-noir, drama, thriller
National Film Registry (inducted 2021) · NYT Best 1,000 Movies · Roger Ebert's Great Movies
0.644 citations - 18
1966 · United States · thriller
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1966 #8 · Sarris's annual top 10 1966 #4
0.532 citations - 190.501 citation
- 200.322 citations
- 21
1955 · United States · mystery, comedy, thriller
NYT Best 1,000 Movies · Rosenbaum's Essential Cinema
0.282 citations - 22
1927 · United Kingdom · silent, crime, mystery
Criterion Collection spine #885 · Edgar Wright's 1,000 favorite movies
0.272 citations - 23
1934 · United Kingdom · thriller, mystery, drama
Criterion Collection spine #643 · Edgar Wright's 1,000 favorite movies
0.272 citations - 24
1929 · United Kingdom · crime, thriller, drama
Edgar Wright's 1,000 favorite movies · Rosenbaum's Essential Cinema
0.222 citations - 25
1948 · United States · thriller, crime, drama
Edgar Wright's 1,000 favorite movies · Rosenbaum's Essential Cinema
0.222 citations - 260.171 citation
- 270.171 citation
- 280.111 citation
- 290.111 citation
- 300.111 citation
- 310.111 citation
Complete filmography
All 68 directorial credits recorded on Wikidata, in chronological order; films in our library link to their canon-score page.
- 1923Always Tell Your Wife
- 1923Woman to Woman
- 1924The Passionate Adventure
- 1924The White Shadow
- 1925The Pleasure Garden
- 1926The Mountain Eagle
- 1927Downhill
- 1927Easy Virtue
- 1927The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
- 1927The Ring
- 1928Champagne
- 1928The Farmer's Wife
- 1929Blackmail
- 1929Juno and the Paycock
- 1929The Manxman
- 1930An Elastic Affair
- 1930Elstree Calling
- 1930Murder!
- 1931Mary
- 1931Rich and Strange
- 1931The Skin Game
- 1932Number Seventeen
- 1934The Man Who Knew Too Much
- 1934Waltzes from Vienna
- 1935The 39 Steps
- 1935The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Secret Agent
- 1936Sabotage
- 1936Secret Agent
- 1937Young and Innocent
- 1938The Lady Vanishes
- 1939Jamaica Inn
- 1940Foreign Correspondent
- 1940Rebecca
- 1941Mr. & Mrs. Smith
- 1941Suspicion
- 1942Saboteur
- 1943Shadow of a Doubt
- 1944Aventure malgache
- 1944Bon Voyage
- 1944Lifeboat
- 1944The Fighting Generation
- 1945Spellbound
- 1946Notorious
- 1947The Paradine Case
- 1948Rope
- 1949Under Capricorn
- 1950Stage Fright
- 1951Strangers on a Train
- 1953I Confess
- 1954Dial M for Murder
- 1954Rear Window
- 1955The Trouble with Harry
- 1955To Catch a Thief
- 1956The Man Who Knew Too Much
- 1956The Wrong Man
- 1958Vertigo
- 1959North by Northwest
- 1960Incident at a Corner
- 1960Psycho
- 1963The Birds
- 1964Marnie
- 1966Torn Curtain
- 1969Topaz
- 1972Frenzy
- 1976Family Plot
- 2014German Concentration Camps Factual Survey
- —
- —Suspicion: Die Bombe im Keller