+8
Even though it might sound like a diss, Silence of the Lambs is just great entertainment. It's the rare movie i'd consider just about perfect that I see more as a vehicle for narrative than making a statement as a piece of 'cinema'. Even a snob like myself can appreciate these sort of things when they are done this good.
Persona is one of Bergman's best and so, by default, is one of the best movies ever. A number of his movies seem to, almost by accident, brush up closely to horror. Not as genre, but in their great sense of doom. Yet, Bergman does not need to fabricate monsters, he only needs to tell us about the futility of existence, the silence of God, the fallacy of identity. He frightens through what his films understand about everyone watching in the audience, that they may not even know about themselves. That they are nobody special and one day they will all die. Persona is one of his many films that cut straight through to these terrors, and it does it just through a conversation between two women, where one woman talks and the other listens, and the silence that surrounds them contains everything worth being frightened of. Greatness.