‘Manhunter: The Final Cut’ Shows Why Director’s Cuts Are Almost Never an Improvement. But It’s Still the Greatest Thriller of Our Time

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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If you’re a movie buff, a cinephile, or whatever else you want to call it (I called my 2016 memoir “Movie Freak”), one of the greatest pleasures to be had is when a film grabs hold of you and won’t let go. That’s happened to me a number of times, with movies like “Nashville” and “Carrie” and “Mean Streets” and “Sid and Nancy” and “Full Metal Jacket” and “Natural Born Killers” and “Boogie Nights.” I’ve been possessed by those films, driven to see them each of them over and over and over again, as if they were albums I was playing. (You can’t play an album too many times; same for a movie you love.) One of the supreme instances of that, for me, is Michael Mann’s “Manhunter.”

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