Tattoo

While Tattoo borrows heavily from both "Seven" and "The Silence of the Lambs," it manages to maintain both a level of sophisticated intrigue and human-scale characters that suck the audience in.

A grim, disquieting mood piece.

Indulging his taste for Grand Guignol and the stylistically baroque, Schwentke never quite overplays his hand, though his occasional lapses into visual extravagance can be irritating, and the result is a nasty, intelligent and complex thriller.

Slick, grisly and determinedly umbral, German cop thriller Tattoo is a largely effective "Se7en" wannabe that gradually develops its own character after an over-derivative start.

Maybe Tattoo is creepy and stylized enough to pull you along anyway, but if you like your thrillers to dig below the familiar epidermis, look elsewhere.

Unlike so many "Seven" followers, it makes its missteps memorably, and offers a variety of stylistic rewards by way of compensation.

This plodding serial-killer procedural grafts hand-me-down malevolence onto a standard rookie-veteran police yarn, the results of which yield nary a fright, let alone a goose pimple.