Variety names Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO the best film ever made

Variety recently listed the 100 Greatest Movies Ever Made and ranked them. Alfred HitchcockThe 1960 movie Psychopath it ended up being ranked as the number one best film ever made. I’m actually very surprised by this! Most lists have Citizen Kane or The Godfather listed as number one. While I love Psychopath, and it’s an incredibly incredible film with a fascinating behind-the-scenes story, it’s one I didn’t expect to see at the top of a list like this. But I’m glad it is.

Because they chose Psychopath as the best of all time? Here is the explanation they provided:

There is hardly a frame of Alfred Hitchcock’s cataclysmic slasher masterpiece that is not iconic. If you don’t believe it, consider the following: Eyes. Holes. Birds. Downloads. Windshield wipers. A shower. A bust. A knife. “Blood, blood!” A Victorian staircase. Mother in her rocking chair. For decades, “Psycho” has enjoyed such cosmic pop-cultural infamy that, amusingly, its status as a work of art has been overshadowed.

Hailing it as Hitchcock’s greatest film – let alone the greatest film ever made – wouldn’t have seemed respectable enough. Yet there’s a reason that every moment in Psycho is iconic, and that Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, as Norman Bates and Marion Crane, are fixed in our imaginations like figures straight out of a dream. The entire film, though shot on late 1950s televisions and conceived by Hitchcock as a gothic audience trapdoor thriller, was born (and, indeed, always was) on the level of a compelling mythology.

In 45 seconds, the shower scene splits the 20th century in two; what Hitchcock was expressing was profound: that in the modern world the center would no longer hold. And once the film kills its heroine (killing, in the process, the very idea that God will protect us), it transforms into cinema’s most hypnotic, seductive, and prophetic meditation on fear, lust, innocence, violence, and identity.

Perhaps more than any film ever made, ‘Psycho’ is a film you can watch over and over and over again. It’s a film that speaks to us now more than ever, because it shows us, in every playfully sinister moment, how life itself has come to feel like a funny house poised over an abyss.

You can really argue about it! They make some great points there and it’s a strong argument as to why the film deserves to be at the top of the list.

The rest of the Top 10 includes The Wizard of Oz, The Godfather, Citizen Kane, pulp Fiction, Seven Samurai, 2001: A Space Odyssey, It’s a wonderful life, All about Eveand Save Private Ryan. To see the full list of the top 100, you can click here.

Think Psychopath does it deserve to be at the top of the list? Are there other films that you think deserve more?

Also, I just have to print the original trailer of Psychopath it’s one of the best trailers ever made! You can watch it below!