The second best in the series.

Yes, I agree.

I think movie had a great cast. The Norton / Hopkins scenes were better than the Foster / Hopkins scenes in the original. I also like Harvey K. as Crawford and Ralph Fiennes as the villain. The tooth fairy was a better villain than Buffalo Bill

The big issue with this movie is that the blind girl scenes dragged on. They had this love triangle with this blind girl as if men would fawn over her. Another big problem is that Hopkins was noticeably older in this movie, which is supposed to occur before the events of Silence of the Lambs. The 1980 scenes in the opening are especially distracting for this reason

Lastly - the premise of this movie (FBI agent uses Lecter to nab killer) had been done already in Silence of the Lambs, so naturally there were some feelings of “been here, done this already” in this movie : it kind of felt like we were retreading old ground, basically