The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Critic Reviews

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is that rare hard-R rated studio film that expertly weaves story and character development into the lascivious subject matter.

[Fincher] has made The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo into an electrifying movie by turning the audience into addicts of the forbidden, looking for the sick and twisted things we can't see.

Mr. Fincher's impressive skill is evident, even as his ambitions seem to be checked by the limitations of the source material and the imperatives of commercial entertainment.

Fincher's Dragon Tattoo rockets through the freezing northern European landscape like the most powerful car on the market.

In less experienced hands, this would surely have wound up as lurid, trashy pulp. Yet Fincher plays it straight and keeps it serious.

Fincher's electrifying storytelling makes the most of unsettling visuals, large casts, complex plots and sharp dialogue.

Mara's bristling, unbridled performance gives the film the ballast it needs to pull off that curious, undeniably engrossing, balancing act.

I don't think I've seen an actor do more with deadpan expressions than Mara does in this movie. Her face doesn't move but, whether she's tasing a man or standing in front of a mirror watching a cigarette dangle from her mouth, we respond to her.

An altogether leaner, meaner, more high-powered, stylish, and deftly directed affair, though similarly hampered by a too-long narrative fuse.

Fincher's film, with its chilly esthetics, would seem as calculated as a Michael Crichton thriller of the '90s. But Mara keeps us entranced even when we want to look away.

It's certainly worth seeing if you missed the original. If you saw it, however, there's no way of unseeing it, and nothing in the new one to top it.

Projects and directors are rarely better matched than The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and David Fincher.

Mara's Lisbeth can be brashly young and impossibly smart. It's a performance that should well serve the upcoming sequels.

[Fincher] never abandons his meticulousness -- it's what allows him to position you in the exact right spot to deliver the blow.

This is a bleak but mesmerizing piece of filmmaking; it offers a glancing, chilled view of a world in which brief moments of loyalty flicker between repeated acts of betrayal.

This is never the kind of movie where they're going to fall in love. That she even smiles is a breakthrough.

"Dragon Tattoo" knows precisely how to achieve its look, rhythm, sound and spirit. It's extremely well made by a genuine and reliable talent. But I thought he was done with this sort of thing.

David Fincher's adaptation of the international best-seller is a triumph of craftsmanship over material.

On to The Girl Who Played With Fire, please!

Fincher pushes the tale of serial killing to the blackest depths of noir depravity.

This Dragon flies, but it never really breathes fire.

Mara's performance has a ferocity that will linger in your mind long after the two or three endings have faded.

The great screenwriter Steven Zaillian's elaborate, convoluted script, so muddled that even after it's over you still don't know what it's all about, is a drawback -- but the movie is a master class in sinister style, tense and deeply uncomfortable.

David Fincher's much-anticipated return to serial-killer territory is a fastidiously grim pulp entertainment that plays like a first-class train ride through progressively bleaker circles of hell.

Once the hype dies, this movie will be best enjoyed as a drinking game. Down a shot of Absolut every time Craig whips his glasses on or off and you'll be blitzed by the halfway point.