Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

A compelling thriller to begin with, but it adds the rare quality of having a heroine more fascinating than the story.

New Orleans Times-Picayune Mike Scott

It's one of the most engaging foreign films to come along since 'Tell No One' in 2008.

St. Petersburg Times Steve Persall

Rapace is a magnetic presence in a far-ranging mystery requiring such a solid character to orbit around.

Christian Science Monitor Andy Klein

The key to the film’s effectiveness is the casting of Rapace, who, while not mapping quite exactly to the book’s physical descriptions, is riveting.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson

Tattoo is as much mood piece as mystery, and the mood is almost always disturbing.

Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

A mind-bending and mesmerizing thriller that takes its time unlocking one mystery only to uncover another, all to chilling and immensely satisfying effect.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

The biggest compliment you can pay the much-anticipated film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is that you can't imagine Stieg Larsson's corker of a story ever having existed in book form.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Rife with nightmarishly violent and horrific behavior. It's intense, graphic, frightening.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

This dynamite thriller shivers with suspense. So if you ignore The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) because it's in Swedish with English subtitles, you probably deserve the remake Hollywood will surely screw up.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Balances character development with plot, and that's crucial to its success.

Orlando Sentinel Roger Moore

A chilling detective tale, a horrific sexual abuse drama and an overlong, emotional, tie-up-every-loose-end melodrama that is sure to be half an hour shorter when Hollywood remakes it without the Swedish dialogue and probably without the cool Swedish edge.

Arizona Republic Kerry Lengel

The feminist subtext should come as no surprise given Larsson's lifelong advocacy on social-justice issues, but it also is a refreshing slant on the familiar character dynamics of crime fiction.

Time Mary Pols

I finished Larsson's novel with the uncomfortable sense it used a good mystery as an excuse to dwell on sadism and perversity -- an aspect only exacerbated on screen.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

A stylish thriller with real complexity, people with interesting faces, a sensational actress cast as an ambisexual Goth hacker heroine--the news about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is nothing but good.

Village Voice John Patterson

May be a shallower experience than the book, but it has a headlong velocity all its own. Catch it before the inevitable U.S. remake.

Time Out New York David Fear

Every so often, you get the gift of watching an under-the-radar actor bloom into a critical-mass phenomenon before your bloodshot eyes: Franka Potente in "Run Lola Run," or Christoph Waltz in "Inglourious Basterds." Add Noomi Rapace to the list; what she does with the title character of this Swedish thriller-cum-pop-lit-adaptation will spawn cults of swooning Rapacephiles stat.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

This is not your mother's murder mystery, unless your mother's maiden name is de Sade and she has an appallingly bleak vision of modern society that occasionally fixates on the historical misdeeds of the corporate/industrial world and the correction thereof.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Joe Williams

This Swedish sensation is a magic trick that jolts the murder-mystery genre back to life.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Stephen Cole

A chilling film best experienced bundled up in a sweater and scarf.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Here’s a paradox: The millions of people who have read Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo are the panting target audience for the Swedish-language film adaptation. Yet they’re also likeliest to be disappointed by this carefully crafted drama, while people who haven’t read the book are likely to enjoy the movie and wonder what the literary fuss is about.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Its stylish and gritty authenticity is superbly suited to this murder mystery.

San Francisco Chronicle Walter Addiego

A potboiler but entertaining enough to rise above its flaws.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

It's the rare 2 1/2 -hour film that doesn't make you look at your watch once. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is such a film.

New York Post V.A. Musetto

The result is a finely plotted, stylishly photographed and brilliantly acted whodunit that clocks in at 2 1/2 hours but never seems long.

NPR Bob Mondello

Lisbeth, pierced, tattooed and played by Rapace with a sometimes uncontrolled ferocity, qualifies as both a victim of male violence and a violent avenger of it. This makes her a lot more compelling than her comparatively passive partner -- something that Hollywood will doubtless find it necessary to "remedy" when Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is remade in English.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

The film makes excellent use of the cold Scandinavian landscape to emphasize the story's gloomy loneliness. And Rapace and 
 Nyqvist have compelling chemistry.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

The movies rarely gives us a woman as fascinatingly complex as Lisbeth Salander, and the happiest news about the two sequels is that she’ll be back.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

However you respond to it, the fraught sexual and investigative chemistry between Mikael and Lisbeth is the most powerful ingredient of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The movie's second half is a capably executed but mostly by-the-numbers procedural.

The Hollywood Reporter Sheri Linden

The result is a character-driven mystery of considerable emotional power, often harrowing and always compelling.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

Noomi Rapace throws herself into the title role, but something about the conception of her character, and about the far-reaching urgency of the sociopathic shocks behind the killing, smacks of a filmmaker pushing too hard. That is why the movie finds it impossible to wind things up.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

The film version stars a wonderful Swedish-Icelandic actress named Noomi Rapace as the hacker and Michael Nyqvist as the reporter. They are excellent and subtle and honest.

Boxoffice Magazine Tim Cogshell

A dark and brooding story that only gets more disturbing over the course its 152 minute runtime.

Variety Boyd Van Hoeij

More of an action-light whodunit than a real thriller, and more of a CliffsNotes version than a deeply disturbing portrait of what's wrong with contempo Sweden.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

Director Niels Arden Oplev keeps the action relatively tight. But he revels in the story’s sadism to an uncomfortable degree, especially in a needlessly vile rape scene. Two more sequels are coming. Here’s hoping there’s just a little less hate in each.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

The cluttered narrative leaves little room for character development, though director Niels Arden Oplev does manage to accommodate plenty of gratuitous torture and rape.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Though Ms. Rapace is a fine professional scowler, with cheekbones that thrust like knives and a pout that’s mostly pucker, she tends to register as an intriguing idea instead of a thoroughly realized character. She more or less looks the part that the filmmakers don’t let her fully play.