The Birds

This movie has no business working as well as it does. It’s a horror movie about birds that largely stops giving its characters room to grow at the halfway point to focus on pure survival. And yet, it’s got such a good build of tension over the course of the entire film through its final moments that it overcomes the thinness of some of what came before. It should be minor Hitchcock, but by pure force of his talent, he turns a small film into a wonderful entertainment.

Much like Psycho, the mov...