Still of the Night (1982)

Roy Schneider is a psychiatrist - the sort role Cary Grant plays in a Hitchcock thriller - and Meryl Streep is the blonde femme fatale who comes to him for help when her lover (his patient) is found murdered, in this enjoyable but dopey tv-grade mystery thriller full of attempts at classic Hitchcock thriller moments - a dream sequence, psychobabble, auction-house hijinx - but all delivered in a laughable threadbare plot.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Birds (1963)

Alfred Hitchcock's third Daphne du Maurier adaptation is her short story about birds attacking the residents of du Maurier's hometown of Cornwall, except the Master of Suspense transfers everything to San Francisco and extrapolates the bare context of the novella into a slow burn psychological drama featuring a Paris Hilton-type socialite with nothing better to do than to pull elaborate practical jokes on a potential new beau, but she has the ice cool smile wiped from her face when she finds herself trapped with him, his mother, his ex, his niece and his Oedipal complex in Bodega Bay, a small town under attack from even more unsettled birds!

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS