Chicago Sun-Times by 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 by Mike Scott

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

The A.V. Club by Tasha Robinson

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

Christian Science Monitor by 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.

Tampa Bay Times by Steve Persall

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

Los Angeles Times by 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.

Philadelphia Inquirer by Steven Rea

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

Rolling Stone by 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.

Miami Herald by René Rodríguez

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.

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

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

Village Voice

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 by 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.

Entertainment Weekly by 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.

The Hollywood Reporter by Sheri Linden

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

Chicago Tribune by 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

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

Variety

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.

Chicago Reader by 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.