Michael Mann's "Manhunter," the first screen adaptation of Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter, returns to cinemas in a director's "final cut" for its 40th anniversary. Brian Cox, not Anthony Hopkins, plays the cannibalistic killer here — five years before "The Silence of the Lambs" made Hopkins's Dr Lecter the definitive version.

Mann wrote and directed the film as an adaptation of Harris's 1981 novel "Red Dragon." In Mann's telling, the character appears under the spelling "Lecktor" and in a relatively minor part. Cox plays him in a coolly matter-of-fact, downbeat register. The review in The Guardian notes that Cox's Lecktor is "first discovered in his cell lying down with his back to the camera" — an entrance that signals Mann's restrained approach to a figure Jonathan Demme would later turn into gothic spectacle.

The comparison between the two Lecters has become a ritual of film culture. As the Guardian's critic puts it, "It has long been a haughty, hipster film-bro affectation to claim that Cox is better in the role than Anthony Hopkins." The reviewer's verdict is blunt: "Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs is the definitive version: face it." Still, the critic allows that Cox's performance carries more interest than Hopkins's by the time the latter made the 2002 "Red Dragon" adaptation, when, in the reviewer's judgment, the franchise had grown tired.

The parenthetical jab captures the debate's absurdity with a music-nerd joke: "(Lecktor's early acoustic stuff was great, you see, before he went electric as Lecter.)"

"Manhunter" earns praise as "a very interesting and watchable movie," though the Guardian finds it "a little unevolved compared to Jonathan Demme's masterly guignol spectacle." The critic sees Demme's debt to Mann clearly, writing that Demme "clearly inhaled Mann's excitement at jets, 'copters and military hardware deployed at speed to bring down just one man." That fascination with technology deployed at velocity — helicopters, jets, the machinery of pursuit — marks Mann's film as the stylistic ancestor of the 1991 Oscar winner, even as Demme pushed the material into fuller theatrical horror.

The re-release gives audiences a chance to weigh the two Lecters against each other on a big screen, and to trace the lineage from Mann's cool procedural to Demme's grand guignol. Forty years on, "Manhunter" stands as the queasy starter to a serial-killer spectacle that Hollywood would spend decades expanding.