Last week, “Gone Girl” was treated to a host of glowing early reviews. This week, the entire internet was abuzz over the onscreen appearance-or-not of Ben Affleck’s wiener. And today, the movie arrives in theaters riding high on a veritable wave of anticipation. But will all that advance excitement translate to a roaring box-office success?
With a critical mass of cultural commentators now having officially weighed in, it looks like the answer is a resounding yes. Here’s what the critics have to say about David Fincher’s latest.
Rosamund Pike will wow you.
“Rosamund Pike will come as more of a surprise. Her previous roles have hinted at her intelligence and ability — she even made audiences believe she was in love with a cigar-chomping Paul Giamatti in ‘Barney’s Version’ — but this is the juiciest role she has had to date, and she makes a meal of it. Everyone who sees ‘Gone Girl’ will walk out raving about Rosamund Pike.” — Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
Expect to laugh, and feel weird about it.
“The most intriguing thing about ‘Gone Girl’ is how droll it is. For long stretches, Fincher’s gliding widescreen camerawork, immaculate compositions and sickly, desaturated colors fuse with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s creepy-optimistic synthesized score to create a perverse big-screen version of one of those TV comedies built around a pathetically unobservant lump of a husband and his hypercontrolling, slightly shrewish wife. For most of its running time, ‘Gone Girl’ is ‘Everybody Loves Accused Wife-Murderer Raymond,’ sprinkled with colorful-verging-on-wacky supporting players[.]” — Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com
Very bad things have never looked so good.
“‘Gone Girl’ looks and sounds sensational, with elegant gray-and-green toned cinematography by longtime Fincher collaborator Jeff Cronenweth and an eerie (if a little too omnipresent) electronic score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who also wrote the fine music for Fincher’s ‘The Social Network’. The link between eroticism and violence, present beneath the surface throughout, becomes explicit in one virtuosically filmed late sex scene that’s gross, graphic, and horrifyingly gorgeous.” — Dana Stevens, Slate
No, really: you’ve gotta see this movie.
“It is fine filmmaking. It is fine acting. But this is, in the end, a story-driven movie, and what makes it work is that Flynn and Fincher together have told the ever-loving heck out of this scary, weird tale, with respect for the pitch-black (really, really pitch-black) humor that occasionally oozes from its pores. They are acting here as social commentators on the topics of gender and marriage and media (it’s just hard to explore that without giving too much away), but they’re also acting as campfire legend-spinners.” — Linda Holmes, NPR
“Gone Girl” is out in theaters nationwide today.
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