Part of Arkadin’s Cooped Up series, spotlighting films that speak to our past year of life under lockdown. 

One of Alfred Hitchcock’s most enduring masterpieces, Rear Window captures better than perhaps any movie ever made the languorous unease of being trapped inside alone with no other company but one’s own weird, obsessive thoughts. For photographer L. B. “Jeff” Jefferies (James Stewart), who finds himself laid up in his Greenwich Village apartment with a broken leg, confinement offers a chance to incessantly spy on his neighbors. Hitchcock’s camera rarely ventures outside Jeff’s apartment, placing the audience in the same tantalizing position of voyeur as Jeff himself. Grace Kelly plays the increasingly concerned girlfriend, who reluctantly gets sucked into Jeff’s monomaniacal compulsions—brought to life with a shocking intensity by Stewart’s clammy, paranoid performance. Both an exquisitely tense peeping-tom tale and a brilliant interrogation of the voyeuristic impulse, Hitchcock’s film is simply one of the greatest thrillers in American cinema. —Keith Watson