Metacritic reviews

The sense of moral responsibility in Hitchcock’s films may have never felt more imperative and succinct.

The bleakest of Hitchcock's films, this stark, deliberate probing of a man wrongfully accused is almost wholly based on fact, creating its drama from a celebrated New York City case.

This is a highly personal and even religious expression of Hitchcock concerning the vicissitudes of fate, predicated on his lifelong fear that anyone can be wrongly accused of a crime and placed behind bars.

Alfred Hitchcock draws upon real-life drama for this gripping piece of realism [from the Life magazine story The True Story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero by Maxwell Anderson]. He builds the case of a NY Stork Club musician falsely accused of a series of holdups to a powerful climax, the events providing director a field day in his art of characterization and suspense.

Hitchcock’s ultimate point evokes cosmic terror: innocence is merely a trick of paperwork, whereas guilt is the human condition.

Hitchcock's coldest, hardest movie until its controversial ending.

Hitchcock's most sombre film, unrelieved by his usual macabre humour; the black-and-white photography and the persecuted Fonda's sharply chiselled features lend an impressive documentary feel.

Suspense mechanics and psychological horror don’t meld quite as seamlessly here as they do in the best Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, but The Wrong Man has more than its share of masterful moments.

The picture has an almost Kafkaesque nightmare realism to it, but the story line wanders diffusely instead of tightening, and the developments become tedious (thought the final discovery of the right man is chillingly well done).

Frighteningly authentic, the story generates only a modicum of drama.