I watched Chungking Express for the first time when I was nineteen or twenty, a baby really. I falling in love with the film and its lush colours, its air of longing, the way its characters were always shouting over California Dreamin. I hardly understood anything about the film when I was nineteen, but today I watched it again, fully cognizant this time of all the quiet heartbreak: Cop 223, buying a can of pineapple every day for thirty…

The most frightening thing about Jake LaMotta isn’t his rage. It’s that look in his eyes when he’s caught onto something, when he thinks he has somebody cornered. He latches on to a sentence, or a phrase, and then he repeats it over and over until it starts to take on a different meaning for everybody in the room. He makes himself believe things that aren’t true, perhaps because he wants these things to be true, because he wants to…

Watching a Hitchcock film is rather like going to a play: you're constantly reminded that everything is just pretend. Even if the experience is great, it never quite makes you realize that the same things can happen to you, that people like these can plausibly exist in real life. But Vertigo feels startlingly true, almost confessional, because it's clear that it's Hitchcock's most personal film, the one that came closest to revealing his inner turmoil.

Vertigo has a plot so…