Time has transformed Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. In 1990, it was an award-winning thriller. Very quickly it became a collection of pop-culture punchlines. Anthony Hopkins’ lip-smacking Hannibal Lecter became hammy, not horrifying; Buffalo Bill’s menace was memed out of him over a decade ago (“It puts the lotion on its skin” became the chorus to a pop song in 2004). But taken on its own terms, Demme’s masterpiece benefits from a different sort of cultural metamorphosis. Silence is now more than anything a feminist police procedural, the existential horror no longer confined to its serial killer storyline, but permeating every interaction Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling has with every man she comes in contact with. Of course, this stuff was always in the movie—it just took almost 30 years for audiences to stop giggling at Hannibal’s one-liners and catch up to what Demme and Foster were doing. by Bobby Roberts