The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Directed by David Fincher

(R)

****

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David Fincher’s creepy take on the popular Stieg Larsson novel is superior to the 2009 Swedish original, said Rex Reed in The New York Observer. Though its most violent scenes are nearly unwatchable, it’s a “technically superb” work, “a master class in sinister style.” You simply “can’t take your eyes off Rooney Mara,” said David Denby in The New Yorker. Though it takes a while before Mara’s Goth-styled computer hacker finally teams up with Daniel Craig’s disgraced journalist to help find a woman who went missing 40 years earlier, Mara “makes every scene that she appears in jump.” Her Lisbeth Salander is both “anti-social and intensely sexual,” both vulnerable and “overequipped” to exact revenge on every bully or abuser she encounters. The film retains the book’s “somewhat lumpy structure,” including its anticlimactic ending, said Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly. Yet Mara “redeems” even the unnecessary coda, and Fincher makes the rest of the film electrifying by “turning the audience into addicts of the forbidden.” We spend all 158 minutes craving to unearth “the sick and twisted things we can’t see.”