The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden) (2009)

Released in the same year, 2009, as Dragon Tattoo, this sequel in fact takes up the story one full year later, so was released in shorter time than the story - but that is still so short a time, Played With Fire feels like just the second half of one looong movie - with this part filling in some of the details surrounding Salander's, er, particular way of being (ruthless, traumatised goth fighting machine) while she computer-hacks and investigates and becomes the prime suspect in another mystery, this time involving sex trafficking, which she investigates in unison with - but again physically distanced from - her journalist friend (Michael Nyqvist as Blomkvist) and it ends up being more "James Bond" than the first movie's Agatha Christie-style 40-year-old murder-mystery-in-a-mansion - there's even a hulking Jaws character impervious to pain!

★★★☆☆

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The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor) (2009)

I came very late to these adaptations of the Stieg Larsson books - was I on another planet? - but have, in 2021,  finally watched the Swedish movie series and can say they are gripping, often brutal action mysteries, this first one introducing Noomi Rapace as the kickass title heroine who investigates a 40-year-old murder mystery, one of those plots that require a fair suspension of your disbelief as details from all those decades ago present themselves to the hacker-slash-investigator impossibly conveniently, untouched and intact in the modern day.

★★★★☆

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