95
The Silence of the Lambs review
A trainee FBI agent must earn the cooperation of an imprisoned cannibal to catch an active killer. The film is about being looked at, and it never let…
★★★★½ 4.9/5
Jonathan Demme
Demme worked across genre, documentary, and concert film, and his most distinctive technique — direct address to camera — gives his best work a documentary intimacy. He is one of the few directors to have won the Academy Award for Best Director for a horror-adjacent film.
Signature and approach
- Direct-to-camera close-ups that implicate the viewer
- Documentary-inflected realism
- Music used as live performance
- Subjects about institutional power
- 1Films reviewed
- 95.0Average score
- 1944Born
- AmericanNationality
Films by Jonathan Demme in our collection
Ordered by release date. Every entry links to the full review.
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95
Filmography reviewed
Year, genre, runtime and score for each film.
| Film | Year | Genre | Runtime | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Silence of the Lambs | 1991 | Thriller | 118 min | 95 |
Reading Jonathan Demme in context
This page collects every film by Jonathan Demme that we have reviewed in full, along with our average score across that body of work. It is not a complete filmography: our library is curated, and we only list films we have written about at length.
For a wider view, the genre hubs place this work alongside films by other directors, and the ranked lists show where these titles sit against the rest of their decade or genre.
Explore the wider collection
Genre hubs and ranked lists are the fastest way to read around a director's work.