Julianne Moore did a much better job...

Jodie Foster is the best actress working today. She was smart enough to turn down the role that Moore accepted.

EDIT And you “just had” to make your post here, on The Silence of the Lambs discussion and not on the Hannibal discussion, even though your post purports to be in praise of Moore, because it’s really not. It’s a slam on Foster.

I’m getting seriously sick of this place. It’s become overrun with pimply boys with one hand stuffed down the front of their pants. The good news is, there’s nothing there for them to clutch.

Quite predictably, Bob is gone as a poster, or an entity.

I disagree. I thought that Foster was terrific as a person whose insecurity goes all the way down, who spent the whole film trying to act secure and professional. She radiated the tension of someone who has no talent for falseness trying to keep up a façade, whose sex and age and background make her feel totally out of place where she is, and whose worst nightmare is having to let anyone see who she really is.

It's not really fair to compare her to Moore, they were really playing different people. Moore made little impression on me, but her Starling was older and more secure, she didn't have as much built-in dramatic tension.