Manhunter

Probing psychological study of madness and damn scary to boot. Read full review

Joan Allen, Tom Noonan and Dennis Farina contribute to the class in a truly underrated chiller. Read full review

One of the most impressive American thrillers of the late '80s. Read full review

Michael Mann is in top form here helming this bone-chilling thriller. Read full review

A gory and gorgeous cop thriller -- you'll forgive it almost anything, so full is your eye with the beauties of its design and photography, and your ear with its supercool electronic music. For all its faults, it's one of the most sensually thrilling movies of the year. Read full review

The best Hannibal Lecter movie and one of the greatest suspense movies ever made... A lurid masterpiece that pays homage to the seductiveness of pulp, not by dressing it in the trappings of fine art but by stripping it to the essentials of what we responded to in the material in the first place. Read full review

As with all of Mann's films, Manhunter is an intense experience. All of the actors, including even legendary goofball Chris Elliott, give brooding, serious performances. Read full review

Mann takes all the instincts he learned as a Miami Vice producer and trims them of their excesses, and the result is an unsettling thriller whose detached style perfectly complements its psychological intensity. Read full review

Mann’s focus is so esoteric that he slowly turns the garish thriller into a kind of poetry. Read full review

William L. Petersen (''To Live and Die in L.A.”) gives another mesmerizing, seeming nonperformance as the brilliant agent on the trail of a serial killer who has murdered families in the South. [29 Aug 1986]

The brilliance of Michael Mann's Manhunter is that it appreciates that the true nexus of humanity is our shared closeness. Read full review

Based on the ingenious novel "Red Dragon" by Thomas Harris, it keeps the nerves racing on fear-fuel until its oddly anticlimactic climax. [15 Aug 1986, p.N29]

Mann, the executive producer of "Miami Vice," can be too stylish for his own good, but the movie holds the viewer all the way to the predictably explosive end. [25 Aug 1986, p.63]

Petersen is superb as the obsessive investigator who risks madness each time he takes on a case, and Tom Noonan is absolutely chilling as the psycho killer. Read full review

What matters in movies like this is that, with only hours, then minutes, then seconds to go as the murderer waves a knife in the vicinity of the blind woman's throat, the good guys are closing in, and Mr. Mann builds to his climax with considerable force. Read full review

An unpleasantly gripping thriller... Interesting Hitchcockian guilt transference territory and Mann's grip on his material is tight and sure. Director is at all times preoccupied by visual chic. Read full review

I'm rather intrigued with what Mann does with his stylistic envelope: it's simultaneously hypnotic and enervating, meditative and empty, like a white-noise background or a field of electronic snow on the tube. Read full review

The movie takes you over, shakes you for a couple of hours and then turns you back out into the street, limp. You've grown to know a lot about its characters. But when you think about them, you realize that you don't want to know this much. They're hollow men, on both sides. [15 Aug 1986, p.D1]

Thanks largely to Petersen, Manhunter does occasionally evoke the peculiar pleasures of Harris's novel, and it does get under the skin, but only because the picture amounts to an aural mugging: the soundtrack, credited to The Reds & Michael Rubini, is Tangerine-Dream-styled electronic offal cranked up to rock concert decibels. [15 Aug 1986, p.D11]

With Manhunter, there seems to be some danger that style has overrun content, leaving behind a vast, chic, well-cast wasteland. [15 Aug 1986]

Manhunter is full of useful tips on interior decoration, but a movie it's not. [15 Aug 1986, p.JC]

Without a compelling - and convincingly compelled - character at its center, the details in this film lack an agonizing drop-by-drop tension. The various pieces fall apart like the shattered mirrors that figure in the crimes. [15 Aug 1986]