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Hitchcock is in brilliant form here: building his seductive, nightmare logic; choreographing a wordless nine-minute sequence as Scottie develops the first stirrings of obsession; pointing Stewart's farm-boy common sense inexorably toward sexual neurosis, and fashioning Novak's street-girl sexuality into a dream girl swathed in soft light. In a way, Vertigo is also Hitchcock's sidewise confession of cinematic fetishism. Since the early 1930s he had cast as his heroines blond actresses with a cool, taunting magnetism: the aristocrat as slut. Grace Kelly was his ideal ice queen, but she fled from the movies to Monaco. And so, in her image he created a new goddess out of Novak's malleable clay. Today, a quarter-century after making Vertigo and four years after his death, the master manipulator steps from behind his camera to incriminate himself in the glorious guilt of the movies. He is not smiling. — By Richard Corliss