Alfred Hitchcock: Chillingly contemporary - latimes.com

The LA Times Kenneth Turan delivers one of the best (to date) articles on Hitchcock 2012.  Of course, it helps in my estimation, that Vertigo is one of the writer's personal favorites.

From the article:

There's but one problem with welcoming Alfred Hitchcock back to the public eye: He's never really been away. But even if you grant that the director is a man for all of cinema's seasons, what is it about him that makes this moment in time so indisputably his?

Within little more than a month, two dramatic films with Hitchcock as the protagonist will have graced screens: HBO's "The Girl" looks at the director (played by Toby Jones) during the making of "The Birds," while Fox Searchlight's "Hitchcock" goes back a few years earlier to examine the creation of "Psycho" with Anthony Hopkins in the title role.

Not only has Universal just released a handsome "Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection" boxed set bringing 13 of his films to Blu-ray for the first time, but one of those motion pictures, 1958's "Vertigo," was just named the greatest film of all time in British film magazine Sight & Sound's highly regarded international critic's poll, knocking "Citizen Kane" off that perch for the first time in decades.

 

In Britain, where Hitchcock was born, the frenzy is even more intense. The British Film Institute has successfully launched a fund-raising campaign puckishly called "Rescue the Hitchcock 9" in order to restore the director's surviving silent films — one of those, the 1927 boxing drama "The Ring," showed to turn-away crowds this year at Cannes — and a complete BFI retrospective of all his 50-plus features was accompanied by an admiring critical compendium entitled "39 Steps to the Genius of Hitchcock."

"Of all the great directors," critic James Bell writes in that book's introduction, "it is Hitchcock who above all has come to embody the cinema to people across the world...

Alfred Hitchcock: Chillingly contemporary - latimes.com