Ask Mick LaSalle: Is ‘Vertigo’ Hitchcock’s best movie?

Peter Bogdanovich was asked how he felt about “Vertigo” replacing “Citizen Kane” as the best movie ever made.

Do you agree with Bogdanovich that “Vertigo” isn’t Hitchcock’s best film?

Or to the mood of the public, which can also be called “fashion.”

Critics, like grammarians, are always trying to fix things in time, to make rules and pin down elements that are fluid, possibly as a way of not having to think about them again.

The real measure of an artist isn’t the one great work but the fact that an artist lasts even as his or her individual creations hover, like blue chip stocks, going up and down in value while never going away.

With the recently released film “Genius,” about famed editor Maxwell Perkins, I’m wondering if you have a “top five” list of favorite movies about writing or writers.

Limiting it to real-life writers, not fictional characters that happen to be writers, I don’t have a top five, but thinking back, there are eight titles that I particularly like.

Ken Russell’s “Salome’s Last Dance” (about Oscar Wilde) and “Gothic” (about Shelley, Byron and Mary Shelley) are remarkable films, visually magnificent and borderline crazy — almost out of control, but not.

“Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle” is particularly interesting for its presentation of writers who were good, but not great, and what that’s like.

[...] everybody should see “Miss Potter,” with Renee Zellweger, about the life of Beatrix Potter, which was released in 2006 and immediately became an obscure film.

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