Stanley Kauffmann

Anthony Hopkins plays [Lecter] perfectly. . . . Most of the other performances [right word? I've abbreviated on my copy] are adequate. Exception: Anthony Heald . . . .

Another exception: Jodie Foster as the trainee. I have to enter a dissent about her work in general. She got rave reviews, and an Oscar, for her performance in The Accused, but it seemed to me relatively facile, broad acting, in which a woman was not created as much as collected from off-the-shelf choices--accessible to dozens of modestly talented people. Foster was luckier to get the part than she was subtle or original in playing it.

Here again, in Lambs, the role itself does the acting for her, so to speak. Her spare, peck-mouthed face is not a highly expressive actor's mask. Her acting choices, from moment to moment, always seem to come from an available stock. I kept thinking of what Rebecca de Mornay could have done to freshen the role--[get review--does he say "I"] thought of de Mornay because in 1988 she played an FBI trainee in a piece of tripe called Feds. (Careers and Oscars and all that are sometimes as much a matter of luck as talent.) De Mornay has the almost scary power of concentration that a good actor must begin with; Foster seems to have not much more than industrious application. She fills in the spaces allotted to her by the script, but she never provides more than the expected.

Stanley Kauffmann
New Republic, February 18, 1991