Popular reviews

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  Review by Mike Ginn ★★★★½ 9

  Hopkins & Mikkelson both play Lecter with a poise and polish but Brian Cox seems like he actually eats people.

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★★ 8

  Everything with you is seeing, isn't it? Your primary sensory intake that makes your dream live is seeing. Reflections, mirrors, images...you've seen these films, haven't you my man?

  -Me, to everyone who follows me on Letterboxd

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 14

  of course mann was the first to realize that the ideological structure of both the cop narrative and the serial killer narrative were identical and cyclically reinforced each other, decades before the whole 'true crime' genre was established. the institution of the police needs the serial killer as a spectacular fantasy, it projects that psychopathy as an manufactured industry, and the serial killer as this fantasy requires the threat of law enforcement and the prison industrial complex to justify their killings, to validate their identity as an iconoclastic 'deviant'. manhunter is more than a simple exploration of duality: it's a broken mirror reflecting back the viewer's own social perception.

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 15

  Was an 88, now a 100

  Is there a more dangerous Hollywood film than Manhunter? Not necessarily on an ethical/moral level of what it’s showing, but *why* - it conveys, on an allegorical register, exactly why we all stumble into a dark auditorium with a crowd of strangers and share in fantasies, dreams, desires, even more so than Vertigo or Abel Ferrara’s Dangerous Game. The film gives us nothing less than a neon fairy-tale of a man who is employed to hunt other men who delight in watching and murdering human bodies. The key is the record – the saved document of the act. An object as coveted as the act itself. Rewinding, unspooling, and letting them linger in the…

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  Review by Jake Isgar 8

  Calling media "dated" as strictly a pejorative needs to stop. It implies that only contemporary works matter because they're about The Way We Live Now, ignoring the archival value of a cultural statement. Sure, there's a spectrum through which one can have this conversation, but it very often winds up as a dead-end. If there is a common complaint with Mann's work, it's that his attempts at staying in the vanguard of taste fossilize portions of his works in amber -- specifically with music.

  So much of how we process and compartmentalize taste and our own sense of time comes from nostalgia, that created bridge between actual experience and remembered experience. That's how Will Graham inserts himself into the headspace…

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  Review by demi adejuyigbe ★★★★ 7

  An extremely 80s but genuinely great mystery thriller about three total psychopaths (Hannibal, Tooth Fairy, William Petersen)

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  Review by jourdain searles ★★★★ 4

  the colors! the score! the men!

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  Review by esther ★★★★★ 4

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 5

  can we talk about how david fincher has made an entire career out of ripping off this movie

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  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★½ 1

  a powerful testament to what a group of Chicagoans and Brian Cox can do together

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★★

  The blue in this movie is the bluest blue that has ever blued in a movie before. Just an A+ blue. And that scene with blind Joan Allen petting a sedated tiger ... can a scene still be considered a non-sequitur when it quietly holds the key to the entire film? There a lot of tigers in Manhunter, and sometimes they seem so calm you might trick yourself into thinking you can touch them without getting hurt.

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 10

  Just like Thief, this film contains
  one of the greatest scores ever composed.