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100It's a triumph of the film that it manages to make Jeffrey Dahmer a human being -- at least a member of the species -- without ever bending toward empathy with or excuses for him.
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90Jacobson produces a remarkably creepy piece of cinema that disturbs by suggestion, nuance and ambiguity.
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83To explain a serial killer is to diminish his madness, but Dahmer does something quietly riveting. It lets you brush up against the humanity of a psycho, without making him any less psycho.
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80Aided enormously by Jeremy Renner, his astonishing lead actor, Jacobson has created something we haven’t seen since “The Silence of the Lambs”: a sensitive, non-exploitative serial killer movie.
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80Uses the serial killer's life as the starting point for a hypnotic examination of the farthest reaches of loneliness and alienation.
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Jacobson has achieved the unthinkable: He humanizes a notoriously brutal psychopath and, in the process, leaves the audience with an unwelcome sense of complicity.
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75The performances are excellent and the filmmaking is remarkably restrained, although moments of perverse violence are necessary to the real-life story being told.
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70The purest of horror films.
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A low-key but hypnotic portrait of the infamous sex murderer.
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67The whole of it plays like a dark and dreary tone poem, only marginally interested in explaining the ticking, bloody clockwork of the inner beast and only occasionally touching on his fractured humanity.
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60As gamely as the movie tries to make sense of its title character, there remains a huge gap between the film's creepy, clean-cut Dahmer (Jeremy Renner) and fiendish acts that no amount of earnest textbook psychologizing can bridge.
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60Star Jeremy Renner seems shorter than Dahmer, but is otherwise a look-alike and gives a convincingly intense and weird performance. Bruce Davison (as Papa Dahmer) and the rest of the cast also do nice work.
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50A tasteful, intelligent, well-acted film about one of the most ghoulish serial killers in American crime history - and I'm afraid that's a good part of what's wrong with it.
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50The film - dimly lit and with an ominous soundtrack that verges on overkill - is largely a showcase for the heavy-lidded Renner.
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It succeeds, occasionally.
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50Renner's performance as Dahmer is unimpeachable, fascinating without being charismatic, and Kayaru's Rodney is a marvel of complicated characterization under difficult circumstances.
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50Dahmer moves with a slowness that's meant to be compelling but is largely merely glum. This becomes a hindrance to building suspense in telling a true story whose outcome is already well known.
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25So lacking in insight and gravity that it makes Dahmer seem like a pesky, pasty-faced loser who just wasn't popular enough.