Glenn Close will be widely praised for her subtle work in Albert Nobbs, as the eponymous Irish woman surviving the nineteenth century disguised as a male waiter. Her performance nevertheless seems to be a classic case of undermugging (if one can have a classic case of something I just invented.) While I admire her willingness to try something so tranquil, the result is understated understatedness, which has a strange way of

I’ve seen The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo twice, now, in both the Swedish and Hollywood version. English doesn’t improve it. Given that it has the same flaw--a glacial, hard-to-edit first chapter shocked to life by a gripping second--it appears to be a problem with the story, or at least how the enormously popular Stieg Larsson best-seller travels to the screen. I prefer the Swedish version, starring Noomi Rapace to David Fincher’s