Cecil-B

Anthony Hopkins reprises his role as Hannibal-the-Cannibal, Edward Norton replaces Jody Foster as the plucky young FBI agent assigned to milk the Cannibal for insights into another psychotic serial killer, Harvey Keitel puts on a business suit and eases off on the strangeness to play Norton's supervisor, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman joins in as a pusillanimous tabloid reporter. Lastly, blending pathos and horror, the officially certified top-cinema-villain (American Film Institute) Ralph Fiennes brings us the tortured torturer whose capture drives the plot. So much talent-talent that couldn't overcome the implied director's instruction "make it just like SILENCE OF THE LAMBS".

By the midway point of the film, the pace had picked up considerably as had the threat level to the good guys and the edge of the seat races between gothic murders and heroic rescues. But to both my wife and me the whole enterprise seemed stale. The performances of the great actors lacked energy. The term "phoned-in" comes to mind.

We watched this movie with our 13 year old granddaughter, who is a very savvy film-goer, for her age, and she liked it. She is in fact a real connoisseur of the horror genre, and she had no complaints about this venture. We should also mention that we saw this film on an up-to-date 85" Sony 4k model attached to a fairly high-end LG Atmos sound bar with powered sub. I feel that we gave the movie a fair shot at showing its "stuff", but it just isn't there. If you are not as jaded as a pair of old movie buffs you may enjoy this mediocre performance by a team of gifted actors and production pros.

De gustibus non est disputandum...Taste is not a matter for argument. The great director's next-to-last American-made movie is either a fine example of the man's social criticism or a tedious melodrama. Review "numbers" that we amateur critics have given the film range from a barely watchable 4 to an enthusiastic 10. Talk about a lack of consensus.

The twin plot lines concern a fight over management of a news media empire and the hunt for a young male serial murderer of attractive women. The element connecting the two is the contest among executives set up by the callow new owner of the company, the ne'er do well son of the hard-working founder. The "contest" offers the position of second-in-command to the newsman who solves the mystery of the murderer.

The newsmen are a mixture of high-mindedness and venality, genuine romance and shabby use of women. I don't have a clue as to the background of my fellow reviewers, so I can't say why some found insightfulness in Lang's portrayal of a modern news media company while others, such as this reviewer, saw nothing beyond the obvious. It was the longer scenes between male and female that proved hardest for me to watch, and not because Lang was making an unpleasant point. To be blunt, the scenes seemed ridiculous. We've all seen films with lots of snappy dialogue between men and women, in which realism takes a back seat to cleverness. There's nothing snappy in these scenes.

If one is curious, one might want to watch this movie to see how unfamiliarity with the everyday behavior of people from a different culture than a director's own distorts the director's attempt to produce realistic scenes.