The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Reviews
Top CriticFincher's 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo': Retrofuturism
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.
Fincher's Dragon Tattoo is a faithful adaptation that brings the dazzle but shortchanges on the daring... It's gloriously rendered but too impersonal to leave a mark.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
What he has delivered is adequate, but it doesn't have any flavor - and of all the things Fincher is, "bland" is not usually one of them.
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| Original Score: C+
David Fincher's adaptation of the international best-seller is a triumph of craftsmanship over material.
An altogether leaner, meaner, more high-powered, stylish, and deftly directed affair, though similarly hampered by a too-long narrative fuse.
Even Fincher's elegantly gruesome style can't turn this Swedish noir into the meditation on evil and corruption that it fancies itself to be.
Provides all the jolts and forward motion that any good airport novel gives you, but it's the film equivalent of the book that kept you awake from Chicago to Baltimore, only you don't feel bad about leaving it on the seat next to you after you land.
When it comes down to it, this is Rooney Mara's movie, and I don't care if the second and third stories are any good as long as they are full of Lisbeth Salander.
This is what a movie adaptation should be: a film whose base narrative has its roots in the source material but whose soul can be identified through the images that unfold on screen.
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| Original Score: 4/4
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.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Mara's Lisbeth can be brashly young and impossibly smart. It's a performance that should well serve the upcoming sequels.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Mara's bristling, unbridled performance gives the film the ballast it needs to pull off that curious, undeniably engrossing, balancing act.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The Swedish version was sloppier and trashier, which suited the material. If that movie was more lurid, it also packed more genuine emotion.
It's stylish, if not exactly subtle, and daringly brutal for a Hollywood movie. It's also so uneven and overlong that it may leave non-fans wondering what all the fuss has been about.
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| Original Score: 2/4
This Dragon flies, but it never really breathes fire.
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| Original Score: B-
The kick in this material, especially in this new version which plays down Mikael's surliness, is Lisbeth, a pixieish polysexual outlier who seems equipped with her own portable storm cloud.
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| Original Score: B
Seeing Fincher's version is like getting a Christmas gift of a book you already have.
The dynamic between Craig and Mara in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is so sensational, it instantly propels the movie beyond glossy, high-toned pulp into something far more affecting.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
This is an ingenious and engrossing work of pop cinema. That said, when it was over I felt a wave of ennui wash over me upon reflecting that we've got two more of these to go.
A solidly crafted, creepily suspenseful thriller.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Fincher's electrifying storytelling makes the most of unsettling visuals, large casts, complex plots and sharp dialogue.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
This film's cold, almost robotic conception of Salander as a twitchy, anorexic waif feels more like a stunt than a complete character, and so the best part of the reason we care enough to endure all that mayhem has gone away.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
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.
In the incendiary performance by Rooney Mara, one of the year's best, you have all the incentive you need to drag out the Dragon Tattoo gun yet again.
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| Original Score: 3/4
This is never the kind of movie where they're going to fall in love. That she even smiles is a breakthrough.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The Swedish version was originally made for television and seen in installments. Fincher's movie is 158 minutes and meant to be seen in one shot - and that's precisely how those 158 minutes go by, in a shot.
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| Original Score: 4/4
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.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Projects and directors are rarely better matched than The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and David Fincher.
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| Original Score: A-
"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.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Not too surprisingly, Fincher doesn't bring his auteur A-game here, though his crafty B-game is better than most.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Fincher pushes the tale of serial killing to the blackest depths of noir depravity.
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| Original Score: 4/4
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.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Mara's performance has a ferocity that will linger in your mind long after the two or three endings have faded.
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| Original Score: 4/5
[Fincher] never abandons his meticulousness -- it's what allows him to position you in the exact right spot to deliver the blow.
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| Original Score: 5/5
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.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Though Fincher hits all the right emotional beats and does all the memorable set pieces, his exquisite craft can't distract from a number of troubling questions at the story's core.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Crisp, stylish and well-acted English-language adaptation. Rooney Mara rocks this role.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Fans of the book and film should rest easy at how this 'Dragon Tattoo' is still inherently a Swedish tale - set and partly shot in Sweden - and Fincher doesn't flinch from the sexual violence at their core.
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| Original Score: 4/5
[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.
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| Original Score: A
Craig is an anchor of cool rationality and judiciousness around which Mara revolves like a demon.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
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.
Fine American version of the literary sensation delivers everything except that something extra.
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.
