A favorite game among movie nerds is “Name the best four-film run by any of the great filmmakers.” The consensus winner tends to be Francis Ford Coppola’s 1970s: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now. That’s hard to argue with, but my personal pick is Alfred Hitchcock’s sequence of four strikingly different masterpieces between 1958 and 1963: Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. These films give you Hitchcock at his deepest, then his most flamboyantly entertaining, and then his sickest. And then there’s The Birds.

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