Popular reviews

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  Review by Jake Isgar 10

  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 SilentDawn ★★★★★ 9

  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 Will Menaker ★★★★★ 6

  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 demi adejuyigbe ★★★★ 6

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

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  Review by Mike Ginn ★★★★ 5

  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 SilentDawn ★★★★½ 11

  88/100

  Manhunter is a progression of a certain kind of movie making. After The Keep - an ethereal, vivid dreamworld horror - was torn to shreds by Paramount, it only seems fair that Mann received another shot at the same textures that The Keep exudes, even in its compromised form. Like Mann's previous effort, this adaptation of Thomas Harris' Red Dragon is the cinematic equivalent of a waking nightmare; clinical and horrifying even when the monsters are nowhere in sight. It's a film that plays with editing trickery and heightened illusions, contrasting a procedural aesthetic with eerie flashes of surreal imagery and laying a blood-pumping score over each deliberate footstep, but it remains tender; focusing on the central, protective dynamic…

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 7

  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 jourdain searles ★★★★ 3

  the colors! the score! the men!

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 13

  I recently read a book called The Serial Killer Whisperer that my mother sent to me, about a man with brain trauma that found he could relate to serial killers via mail and get them to talk. What the killers mostly told him, from what was printed in the book, was generally aggrandized versions of their crimes, but even the most aggrandized versions of their crimes rarely came close to the theatricality depicted in even the tamest Thomas Harris adaptations that I've seen (admittedly, this is limited). But what Manhunter shows is leagues and leagues closer to what most serial killers are probably like than the television show Habbinal.

  This is notable because both use rich, deep cinematography to draw…

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  Review by Ethan Colburn ★★★½ 6

  It’s amazing what Michael Mann can do.

  You can tell he has a low budget here but he manages to make things feel big, important and eery. What a job directing this he did, it’s really unbelievable.

  As for the cast, it’s weird to see someone else play Hannibal Lecter, especially prior to Hopkins’ famous interpretation, though Brian Cox really holds his own. He delivers a more impulsive and less precise Lecter that is not quite as unnerving but still quite powerful. Tom Noonan is also crazy good! Like he looks like a serial killer, it’s kind of insane.

  William Peterson is far and away the weakest link. I can’t stand when he’s screaming at the sky going “so what would…

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★ 2

  MANHUNTER is not Michael Mann's best film, but that does not preclude it from being one of the best American genre films of all time. Its mixture of exacting, over-researched realism and pure, unabashed style may have nominally inspired an entire generation of TV shows that have made bank for CBS, but nothing in CSI's invasive forensic illustrations (copped from THREE KINGS more than this) produces the same effect of total identification with its ostensibly chilly, distant characters.

  Mann explores the contours around Petersen's sensitive performance, for example, to heighten the sense of figuring things out along with Will. The scene in which Graham puts everything together is maybe the best of its kind, the mix of intense but still…

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 10

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