Pluskylang Great Film overall

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Isbel A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

littlemisshaywood This is well worth the mere 1hr 40 minutes it takes to watch.Beautifully, beautifully shot with some inspired mise en scene it has a solid plot and a good twist. With many a scene I found myself on the edge of my seat...it has a marvellously twisted and sullen mood to it.I also have to commend August Diehl, who takes a magnificent role as the young rookie cop Marc Schrader. As the film progresses you can actually see the horrors he's facing taking their toll in his gradual physical and mental deterioration. But there are strong performances all around, especially Christian Redl as the jaded Chief Inspector Minks.A gritty and gorgeously visual thriller that I can recommend to anyone.

erniemunger A young and inexperienced cop in Berlin sheds his innocence when he is drawn into a series of bloody murders commissioned by a mysterious tattoo fetishist. While a rather untypical product of mainstream European cinema, this first major effort by director Robert Schwentke is nonetheless a good indicator of where young German filmmakers are heading to. It would seem that most of the local filmschool hipsters have been molded by the same standard principles in story and production design that make for occasional good but, alas, also a majority of awful Hollywood flicks. This propensity may be best observed in the seminal TV crime series Tatort (Scene of the Crime), where aspiring cinematographers get a chance to work hands on – Schwentke, for his part, directed three episodes. Though the "cinematic" feel and level of "professionality" of these 90-minute small screen pictures have certainly gone up in the past ten or so years, you have to be alarmed at how interchangeable and, arguably, dull they have become. Tattoo is an ambitious Tatort. It is in a way very mature – scarily so. It's all neatly timed, the story and plot are textbook, the locations well-casted (most likely the only film set in Berlin that does without the usual tourist vistas), the travellings elaborate, the picture is crafty, the soundtrack heavily suggestive etc. But, as the French say, the mayonnaise doesn't blend. In fact, the director's intentions (making a gritty Euro urban thriller) are as subtle as ripping someone's skin off to get his tattoo. (By the way, the idea is by no means new – the 1968 French comedy Le Tatoué with Jean Gabin and Louis de Funès treated this subject in a far more refined way.) Unlike his famous US predecessors, Tattoo never hits the right tone and, worst of all, lacks genuinely creepy moments and an overall tension. "They say a person's house is a mirror to his soul..." See, that's the sort of dialogue, along with some fluffy art talk about 17th-century Japanese tattoo masters, that'll strangle any movie to a pathological death. This general impression extends to the actors who desperately try to come to terms with their storyboard characters. Germany's shooting star August Diehl as an unlikely specimen of a new generation of techno-dancing big city cops delivers a wholly unconvincing performance. Christian Redl is your cynical old school detective with a chip on his shoulder, and lacks depth. Nadeshda Brennicke does her best to play a Kraut version of the femme fatale, which is obviously far from enough. (Well, she is half redeemed once she's dropped her skirt.) And while all this is still more or less acceptable for a late Saturday night telly flick, the end clearly isn't. What happened there? Where was the teacher to get Schwentke to revise his homework? But apart from that glitch, let there be no doubt that this German model pupil is off for a great Hollywood career shooting commissioned box office busters by the dozen. Good riddance, if you ask me.

maria-62 Lynn is a woman with a very delicate and exclusive japanese tattoo on her body. The art and class of the tattoo is so fine that a collector pays enormous amounts of money to obtain the skin art. That means ripping it of the living body in Lynn's case.This is a German crime-movie about two cops (and not the ordinary ones) solving the mystery of the 12 missing bodies/tattoos. Who is the collector, and how can they get in touch with him?The estethic of the movie is beautiful if you ask me. Though it is very in-your-face and raw to some people I can belive. Flames of fire and blood is the theme in contrast to stiff, clean German architecture.I enjoyed this movie a lot and it was althrough an exiting piece of art./Maria

trakl As being fond of thrillers with a dark atmosphere, I was really looking forward to seeing "Tattoo". And indeed - I was not disappointed. Although the film contains some minor flaws, the unique idea of collecting tattoos as works of art is very appealing. August Diehl is brilliant as usual, Christian Redl as the depressive detective Minks is absolutely convincing. The plot leaves some things unanswered, which is quite irritating, but not to consider as an actual flaw. Some characters remind me of some of Lynch's disturbing, mysterious figures. Schwentke tries to give the film an extra layer via images, with which he mostly succeeds. The film quotes "Silence of the Lambs" and "Se7en" but this does not subtract from it's originality. An important genre film able to change the German market.8 out of 10.