Popular reviews

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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 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 Jake Isgar 9

  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 ★★★★★ 13

  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 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 comrade_yui ★★★★★ 11

  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 ★★★★ 4

  the colors! the score! the men!

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  Review by esther ★★★★★ 3

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

  "How many of them made it?"

  "Most of them. Most of them made it."

  These are the final lines of the film, a question Molly Graham asks of her husband. They're standing on a beach at sunset, a fist-pumping 80s rock ballad on the soundtrack. This exchange fills a blank that would normally be used for an affirmation of love or a triumphant conclusory statement. This is Manhunter's version of a happy ending, one in which we breathe a sigh of relief that only a few people died. On its face, it seems shockingly cynical, but Mann genuinely means this to be an uplifting moment. It's as though the film sees it as distasteful to ignore all the violence we've…

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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 Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 10

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

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★ 3

  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 fran hoepfner ★★★★½ 1

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