Sidney Lumet's first feature takes Reginald Rose's 1954 teleplay and confines it almost entirely to a jury room, where eleven men ready to convict a teenager of murder are worked, one by one, toward doubt. Shot in three weeks on a budget of $340,000, it turns a single set into an escalating study of temper, prejudice and procedure, carried by an ensemble led by Henry Fonda, who also produced.
Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman play Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein chasing a break-in story that grows into the reporting that helped end a presidency, told almost entirely from inside the newsroom.
Hitchcock financed Psycho himself after Paramount balked at the material, shooting it fast, cheap and in black and white with his television crew. Anthony Perkins's Norman Bates, Bernard Herrmann's string score and a mid-film murder that removes the film's ostensible heroine turned a low-budget genre picture into the template for the modern horror thriller.