Director David Fincher’s version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is a riveting take on the mega-popular novel. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly magazine filed the following review.

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“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” gives off a kinky, menacing glow. Directed by David Fincher, the movie has a sensuality and danger that the 2009 Swedish film version, dutiful as it was, did not.

The new version sticks close to the spirit and most of the details of Stieg Larsson's Swedish serial-killer novel, in which a disgraced left-wing journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, played by Daniel Craig, is hired to investigate a homicide that has haunted an aristocratic family for 40 years. Larsson's plot is nothing more (or less) than a clever conventional whodunit dunked in glimmers of depravity.

Fincher, however, teases out the mythological grandeur of the material. He's an artist with the eyes of a voyeur, and he has made “Dragon Tattoo” into an electrifying movie by turning the audience into addicts of the forbidden.

As Lisbeth Salander, the sullen 24-year-old hacker who’s the story’s outrageous heroine, Rooney Mara is a revelation. She sports the spiky plumage of a punkette peacock, with pale-gray skin set off by barely perceptible eyebrows, choppy bangs, and piercings she wears like scars. She's like Clarice Starling crossed with Joan of Arc crossed with a homeless, fingerless-gloved teen sociopath. Lisbeth is placed in the care of a piggish guardian whose assaults against her rouse us to her side. Mara acts with a quiet power--a rage chilled into silence--that is almost ghostly.

Lisbeth teams up with Blomkvist on the frozen, wintry island of the Vanger family, where they investigate the murder of 16-year-old Harriet back in 1966. Daniel Craig is at his edgy, alert best, and Fincher manipulates old photographs with a dexterity worthy of the Zapruder film. He also stages a memorable torture sequence, though it’s obvious he felt duty-bound to retain the book's somewhat lumpy last act.

What redeems it, dramatically, is that it's all framed through the eyes of Lisbeth, and Rooney Mara draws us to a quality deep inside her. By the end, Lisbeth can feel something, maybe a touch of tenderness even as she breathes fire.