Manhunter
Cinema 21, $8 admission
Feb 23, 8:45pm

Michael Mann
USA 1986
119 min.
If you’re really hunting for Mann, this is where you start. He always toyed with the idea of cops and criminals as secret twins, but this is the movie he made before that equation ossified into a posture.

In Heat and Public Enemies, the lawman and the lawbreaker share a sense of cool and craft—traits inherited from their workmanlike director. In Manhunter, what they share is madness. It burns in the fluorescent glow of pastel neon, and hovers in the synth music.

So yeah, this is a Hannibal Lecter movie—and The Godfather was a gangster flick. Before Anthony Hopkins turned the cannibalistic head-shrinker into a fava-chewing parody, Brian Cox played him as a beast—an old lion stalking its prey from a white-painted cage. The movie eschews gothic hoo-hah in favor of modernist, clinical hoo-hah, and it’s chilling in ways no other serial-killer picture has hoped to match. Mann himself has never gotten close again. Maybe he doesn’t want to.