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100The superbly crafted suspense thriller…slams you like a sudden blast of bone-chilling, pulse-pounding terror.
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The interplay between Starling and Lector as they share an indefinable, dark understanding gives the film its unforgettable and unsettling power. [14 February 1991, Daily Notebook, p.E1]
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100A movie with this kind of haunting power comes along only once every decade or so. [20 February 1991, Life, p.11D]
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100Hopkins' insinuating performance puts him right up there with the screen's great bogymen. [13 February 1991, Calendar, p.F-1}
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100A mesmerizing thriller that will grip audiences from first scene to last.
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100Delicious with foreboding, a masterly suspense thriller that toys with our anticipation like a well-fed cat.
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97Though the film's subject matter is grisly, the electricity between Foster and Hopkins during their prison tête-à-têtes could power every maximum-security prison in this country.
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90Hopkins plays the cannibalistic doctor with a quiet, controlled erudition, lacing his performance with moments of black humor. His Lecter is a sort of satanic Sherlock Holmes whose spasms of violence are all the more terrifying because they erupt from beneath such an intelligent and refined mask.
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90All sorts of macabre things have gone on, and are still going on just offscreen, in Jonahan Demme's swift, witty new suspence thriller.[14 February 1991]
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90A smart, restrained entertainment, it doesn't splash around in blood and hysteria. It doesn't have to.
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89At long, long last: the real thing.
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88It 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.
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88Chilling and creepy, and there's no denying that the most celebrated aspect of the film -- the Clarice/Hannibal connection -- could not have been accomplished with greater skill.