There’s plenty of stuff to watch on Netflix, but movie-watchers interested in films made before 1990 or so might be better-advised to check out just about any other streaming service out there, because apart from occasional (and modest) anniversary-year collections, Netflix rarely has more than a dozen or so movies from the first 80 years of movie history. The service’s newly added Alfred Hitchcock collection can’t change that single-handedly, but simply by licensing half a dozen Hitchcock films, primarily from the final stretch of his long and suspense-filled career, they have given subscribers the opportunity to actually experience some landmark movies. They’ve also given subscribers the opportunity to experience some bizarre curiosities that not even all Hitchcock fans are particularly fond of. So which are which? Luckily, we’re here to help. Here are the seven Hitchcock movies (six new additions and one perennial favorite) currently on Netflix, sorted by priority. They’re all worth watching, but they’re certainly not all equal.

1. This one is such a no-brainer that even the classics-averse Netflix has had it streaming pretty regularly. (The algorithm must have a thing for formative suspense landmarks; Jaws has been frequently available on the service over the years, too.) You probably don’t need anyone telling you to check out Psycho. Hitchcock’s proto-slasher movie is nearly perfect; even some clunky exposition at the very end can be justified by how it lulls the audience into falling-action mode before jolting everyone with a final shock-cut. But if you haven’t seen it, or haven’t seen it in a while, it’s worth revisiting in the context of his other films, and thinking about what a hard, concise reboot this black-and-white movie must have felt like following the slick and high-spirited adventure suspense of the previous year’s North by Northwest. The movie feels like a straightforward if tense crime thriller as it follows Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) as she steals money from her employer and goes on the run. She stops at the Bates Motel, run by the seemingly low-key Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) and, well, shortly before the halfway mark, the movie makes a pivot with its famous shower scene, reorienting to focus on one of the cinema’s first slashers. Besides being genuinely unsettling, Psycho is a terrific character study, with indelible work from Perkins. It feels like it builds on Hitchcock’s impeccable craft while also going someplace completely, boldly new.

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2. A perfectly reasonable choice for the best Hitchcock movie of all, this limited-location classic proved so durable that its basic set-up of a man confined to his home spying on his neighbors, then possibly witnessing a crime, became a go-to sitcom plot decades later. The original version may be Hitchcock’s best film with James Stewart, who plays J.B. Jeffries, an injured photographer who replaces his camera with a pair of binoculars – or are they essentially the same? The movie’s voyeurism is overt and loaded with metaphors for the obsessive filmmaker, with Jeffries drawn to his neighbors as objects of fascination, affection, derision, and lurid compulsion, among others. And on a technical level, this is perhaps the best of Hitchcock’s thrillers of limitation (see also the real-time Rope or the confined Lifeboat), using point of view and proscenium framing to terrific effect.

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3. 

   The Problematics: ‘Vertigo’, Alfred Hitchcock’s Death-Obsessed Erotic Fantasy

   Repeatedly voted among the best movies of all time by the venerable Sight & Sound poll (it placed first in the 2012 edition, and second in both 2002 and 2022), Vertigo is a knottier and more languid affair than many of Hitchcock’s trademark crackerjack thrillers. In his final film with Hitchcock, James Stewart plays Scottie, an injured cop who becomes obsessed with Madeleine (Kim Novak), a woman he’s asked to tail and whose suicide he seems to witness, affecting his later relationship with another woman who bears a striking resemblance to Madeleine. Again, Hitchcock uses Stewart to address the subtextual desires of the filmmaker: obsession, desire, and control, none of which apparently appealed to audiences at the time. (The film was a commercial and, more surprisingly, critical flop in its day.) Its reputation has grown, obviously, and if it’s not the prototypical Hitchcock picture, it’s a dazzling demonstration of how far he could push what might look like genre exercises to provocative (and dizzying) heights.

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5. Hitch returned to Stewart to remake his own 1934 film, and wind up with probably the better-regarded of the two. (Certainly by Hitchcock; in interview, he said: “Let’s say the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional.”) Stewart plays a man vacationing with his wife Jo (Doris Day) and their son, who is fed information about an assassination plot by chance, and then ensnared in the plot as the bad guys hope to keep him quiet. This version of the story focuses more on the marriage at its center, with strong dramatic work from both Stewart and the usually-sunny Day. In doing so, it also complicates the Stewart persona and his on-screen aging, as Hitchcock consistently did across their three films together, all of which are on the platform.

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6. One of Hitchcock’s stranger films but also one of its most famous for its unnerving take on the creature feature: Without warning or understandable reason, birds begin to attack people in a small California town. The movie is a slow burn at first, but when the birds descend, it becomes more visceral and immediate. Though there are some neat special effects (which also sometimes chafe at technological limits of the time), the movie is scarier for its much-spoofed, much-referred-to imagery, where gathering birds watch and wait for their human prey.

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7. Even for those familiar with Hitchcock’s career might find it a little odd to realize he was still making movies in the 1970s; that, in other words, there was a Hitchcock movie out the same year as The Godfather or, as in the next entry, Rocky and All the President’s Men. Hitchcock’s two 1970s films are not among his most-admired. But Frenzy offers the bizarre novelty of Hitchcock working entirely free of the production standards that dominated most of his career; in the United States, at least, it was now the era of the MPAA, which duly rated this British film an R for its more explicit violence, sex, and nudity than ever before (or since) seen in a Hitchcock movie. (No great feat on “since,” as this was his penultimate feature.) This blackly funny serial-killer movie isn’t top-tier among the films of 1972, nor among the Hitchcock greats; there about a dozen others you should probably watch before this one. But it’s still neat to see the great filmmakers having fun with relaxed standards, and making a movie in the same era as his acolyte Brian De Palma.

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8. As Decider’s Hitchcock Week from 2015 notes, Family Plot doesn’t send the filmmaker off with a bang. Unlike Frenzy, it’s not particularly made to take advantage of newfound cinematic freedoms, and in fact functions as much as a genteel caper comedy, involving two different scheming couples brought together by a fateful job, as it does any kind of thriller. It’s inessential by any measure. And yet! There is something charming about Hitchcock working in that mode, and so far out of his peak period. (At this point, Psycho was 16 years past, or the same age as Lifeboat was when Psycho came out.) If you’ve made your way through the first six movies on this list, you might as well give his final movie a whirl.

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9. Of course, there are far more Hitchcock movies than these seven, the earliest of which arrived 30 years into his career (and 20 years into his run of best-known films). Netflix has been screening far more of them in an expansive retrospective in New York City’s Paris Theater, and it’s too bad more of them haven’t been added to this streaming collection. If you want more of Hitchcock’s best (better, all told, than numbers four through seven on this list), you can also seek out Shadow of a Doubt (1943), which is currently streaming on a free service known as Darkroom, and is arguably his best film of the 1940s (and many fans’ all-time favorite, full stop); Rebecca (1940), Hitchcock’s only Best Picture Oscar winner, which has a flimsy remake on Netflix that’s not nearly as good as the original that streams on Filmzie; North by Northwest (1959), more of a man-on-the-run thriller than a macabre murder plot; and the real-time experiment Rope (1948), his first film with Stewart. There are more still, but add these to the Netflix group and you’ll really be shaping up.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.