This film screened in April 2010.

For director François Truffaut, in the book-length interview with Hitchcock that has never been out of print since its publication in 1966, this mesmerising spy thriller represents ‘the quintessence of Hitchcock’. For John Russell Taylor, author of the first biography, it is ‘one of Hitch’s most romantic, most simple, most secret films’. American critic William Rothman sees it as ‘the first Hitchcock film in which every shot is not only meaningful but beautiful’. For actor Sam Neill it is simply ‘the best film ever made’. Even when measured against Hitchcock’s achievements before and after it, there is indeed something very special about this film, which intricately interweaves global politics with sexual politics, and stars the two finest of all his actors, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. In Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, Wood takes thorough and convincing issue with the charge of misogyny that used to be levelled at Notorious, arguing that ‘essentially, it is Bergman’s film’.