The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is right on track. It’s a stylish thriller with real complexity, people with interesting faces, and a sensational actress cast as an ambisexual Goth hacker heroine. [Noomi] Rapace's haunting, enigmatic Lisbeth is the element that leaves you eager for the next two installments. She's fantastic, and so is the movie.

This Swedish language crime thriller about a tomboyish punk hacker and ace private investigator who teams up with a disgraced middle-aged journalist to solve a decades-old crime is riveting from start to finish. . Niels Arden Oplev's perfunctory adaptation veers from Visconti's 'The Damned' to Jonathan Demme's 'The Silence of the Lambs' without the decadence or the thrills of either.

Steven Rea wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "The rape and torture scenes, a vivid (and necessary) component of Larsson's book, are rendered with fearless detail in the film. They are neither exploitative nor gratuitous, but they are certainly not easy to watch."

Like a good book, the plot is so engrossing, the characters so rich and complex, the mood of gloom mixed with glimmers of hope so all-encompassing that the thought of its actually ending never occurs to you.