One of the greatest films of all time and one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films.

Commercially and critically successful on release, it was nominated for 4 Academy Awards which included Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Cinematography – Color.

Critics of the film on release praised it with Bosley Crowther of The New York Times calling it a “tense and exciting exercise” and a piece of work that has a “maximum of build-up to the punch… (and) carefully tricked deception and incidents to divert and amuse”, while Time called it Hitchcock’s “second-most entertaining picture” and Variety regarded it “an unusually good piece of murder mystery entertainment.”

Roger Ebert praised the film, considering it an “experience… not so much like watching a movie, as like… well, like spying on your neighbors… (with) us accomplices in Stewart’s voyeurism”.

Film critiques and analysis largely consider the film a prime exploration of cinema and storytelling itself - what with its main character’s entertainment and voyeuristic interest in watching and studying the lives of everyone around him. It is profound for the human truths it examines such as “our desire for awful things to happen to people… (in order) to relieve ourselves of the burden of examining our own lives” as John Fawell notes in “Hitchcock and Poe: The Legacy of Delight and Terror” as well as for how it equally showcases the process in which the patriarchal male gaze constructs and chooses the pleasure it wishes to broadcast to its audience as Laura Mulvey notes in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”.

American Film Institute selected the film for its ”100 Years…100 Movies” ranking at #42 and also for their “10th Anniversary List” in 2007 with it at #48.

Today it is positively reviewed by 98% of Critics on Rotten Tomatoes, with the critical consensus claiming it a “masterpiece” in which Hitchcock “exerted full potential of suspense”.