CITY Screen, York, is to present a Monday series of Alfred Hitchcock films under the title of Hitchcock Nights.

The 8.30pm screenings will begin on Monday (July 31) with Vertigo (PG), followed by The Lady Vanishes (PG), August 7; The Birds (15), August 14; Psycho (15), August 21; Rear Window (PG), August 28, and Notorious (U), September 4.

Voted the greatest film of all time by Sight and Sound Magazine, the series-opening Vertigo is a typically idiosyncratic 1958 take on film noir, taking place almost entirely in bright Technicolor daylight.

Hitchcock's direction manipulates the viewer into seeing the world through the eyes of reliable ex-cop Scottie (James Stewart) as he pursues the apparently possessed Madeleine (Kim Novak), then steadily unravels everything we thought we knew.

In 1938's The Lady Vanishes, as a wealthy young tourist (Margaret Lockwood) travels across continental Europe, she realises that an elderly lady seems to have disappeared from the train.

The Birds is a highly innovative 1963 slice of horror wherein a San Francisco socialite (Tippi Hedren) pursues a potential boyfriend to a small Northern California town, where matters slowly take a turn for the bizarre as birds of all kinds suddenly begin to attack people.

From 1960 comes Psycho's torrid tale of a secretary (Janet Leigh) embezzling $40,000 from her employer's client and going on the run, fatefully checking into the remote Bates Motel, run by a young man (Anthony Perkins) under the domination of his mother. Bernard Herrmann's all-strings score provides some of the most famous music in cinematic history.

James Stewart’s photojournalist is confined to his apartment with a broken leg in a sweltering summer in New York in 1954's Rear Window. He begins to observe the lives of those around him, his initially passive activity evolving into voyeuristic obsession, to the point where he thinks he has witnessed a murder.

The series concludes with Notorious, released in 1946 and set at the end of the Second World War when American military intelligence recruits Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), the alluring daughter of a convicted Nazi war criminal, as a spy.

She is teamed up with the dashing but chilly American government agent T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) to infiltrate a band of nefarious Germans who have fled to Brazil, but because of her past, the rigid and judgemental agent refuses to trust her. Their relationship falls apart completely when she agrees to marry the ringleader of the Germans in order to have better access to information.

Tickets are on sale on 0871 902 5726 or at picturehouses.com/cinema/York_Picturehouse