Spooky.pictures

Reviews

Gilbert Cruz, New York Times:

Its influence can be seen everywhere: in a raft of serial killer/profiler movies; in the oeuvre of David Fincher; in more than a few CBS crime procedurals; and in the true-crime documentary and podcast boom of the last decade.

Lizzie Francke, BFI:

[Jodie] Foster is remarkable in the role of the fledgling agent: a backwoods girl from West Virginia, disadvantaged by virtue of her class and sex, striving for equality in the FBI male hierarchy.

Adam Kempenaar, Filmspotting:

[Rewatching it,] I had no sense of how baked into every frame of the movie Clarisse's awareness of her femininity is, and… the awareness of the effect her femininity has on every man she meets.

Duane Byrge, Hollywood Reporter:

Silence is dead-out spellbinding during the cat-and-mouse exchanges between the wily serial killer and the gutty law enforcement trainee.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times:

It has been a good long while since I have felt the presence of Evil so manifestly demonstrated as in the first appearance of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs. He stands perfectly still in the middle of his cell floor, arms at his sides, and we sense instantly that he is not standing at attention, he is standing at rest - like a savage animal confident of the brutality coiled up inside him. His speaking voice has the precision of a man so arrogant he can barely be bothered to address the sloppy intelligence of the ordinary person. The effect of this scene is so powerful that it underlies all the rest of the movie, lending terror to scenes that do not even involve him.

Anthony Lane, New Yorker:

Charges of homophobia [were] levelled at the character of Buffalo Bill, the killer whom Starling hunts, despite the fact that Demme took explicit pains, as Thomas Harris had done in the novel, to disclaim any link between violence and the transgender community… Philadelphia was, in part, an act of atonement for The Silence of the Lambs.