The Must-See, Deeply Influential '80s Crime Caper From the Director of 'Silence of The Lambs' Just Landed on Prime Video

Jonathan Demme's road-trip movie Something Wild, starring Melanie Griffith and Jeff Daniels, is a twisty, tonal, thrill ride.

Jan 18, 2025 - 23:46
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The Must-See, Deeply Influential '80s Crime Caper From the Director of 'Silence of The Lambs' Just Landed on Prime Video

The most complimentary thing you can say about Jonathan Demme is that he's nearly impossible to rigidly define as a director. One of the most versatile filmmakers in recent memory, the late Demme seamlessly shifted between exploitation thrillers, social dramas, broad comedies, horror, and music documentaries for over thirty years. Only someone with an innate sense of genre mechanics and an eye for humanism toward disregarded people could direct The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia back-to-back in the early '90s. While his Best Picture-winning adaptation of the Thomas Harris Hannibal Lecter novel elevated him to the class of prestige directors occupied by his contemporaries who emerged from the Roger Corman school of independent filmmaking, his 1986 black comedy/crime caper, Something Wild, is the definitive Demme movie for a director modeled after an amorphous oeuvre, as this groundbreaking film is a masterclass in genre and tonal shifting.

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