At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Whether you like Hitchcock or not (you should) and whether you think Psycho was an important film for him or not (it was), this is a fantastic deep dive behind the shower curtain. If you know Hitchcock there might not be too many surprises here, yet for even the aficionados, the way this documentary is constructed is captivating. The shower scene is a film within a film. Technical perfection.

This documentary about the infamous shower scene in Psycho has a technical title. 78 camera setups and 52 cuts that took seven days to film.Contributors include Elijah Wood, Bret Easton Ellis, Peter Bogdanovich, David Thomson, Richard Stanley, Sam Raimi, Walter Murch, Eli Roth, Mick Garris, Guillermo del Toro and Jamie Curtis who talk about the shower scene and how it was put together. Bogdanovich also does his trademarked mimicry.There are important aspects discussed such as how to get round the censors. Shooting in black and white helped as you do not see any red blood. We even find out how influential the violence in Psycho was for other films. Italian filmmakers took it to a visceral horror art level. Martin Scorsese even mirrored it in Raging Bull.However at 90 minutes it does feel a bit overlong, there was a lot of waffle and Psycho has been examined to death already.

Let's say you don't have the time for a film class; do you have 1/2 hours to spend to learn a major chunk about film, let's say theme, editing, and auteurism? Then see 78/52, a superb analysis of Hitchcock's famous shower scene.Wayne Miller, who knows more about Hitch than anyone else I know and regularly visits as guest host on It's Movie Time, gave it thumbs up with the observation that the doc was replete with facts and observations he didn't even know.Here is a perfect example of the ideal educational mantra: to teach and delight.

He says Donat and Mr. Memory appear "at the same theater" in the opening and concluding scenes. I don't think so. The first is a raucous music hall with a lively bar crowd. The last is the more-sober London Palladium. It is now incumbent upon me to provide a full five lines as the site requires.