One of the cinema’s greatest villains, Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins in his best-known performance) fascinates us because his ghoulish atrocities coincide quite unconflictedly with qualities that we associate with civilized, well-adjusted existence. A brilliant psychiatrist and a vastly urbane, sophisticated, cultured man, Lecter is a shocking reminder to a therapeutic culture that beyond all psychobabble about “behavior modification” and the like, there remains the sheer reality of good and evil. The doctor is in: God help us all.
—Steven D. Greydanus