Even with the well-established praise for director David Fincher as a master filmmaker — his movies lushly drenched in shadow, his capacity for tough stuff matched only by his care in presentation — it’s easy to forget or overlook his sense of humor, the spoonful of sugar that helps the malevolence go down in his films. 
 
 At his best, Fincher has a sense of humor that not only cuts through the darkness but actually contrasts it to significant effect. After the dour, sour, sadistic Scandanavian misfire of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” it’s a pleasure to note that Fincher’s latest adaptation, of Gillian Flynn’s best-selling novel of the same name, is both wicked and wickedly fun. 
 
 Not only brutal but also brutally funny, “Gone Girl” mixes top-notch suspenseful storytelling with the kind of razor-edged wit that slashes so quick and clean you’re still watching the blade go past before you notice you’re bleeding. 
 
 See video: New ‘Gone Girl’ Trailer Suggests That Ben Affleck Murdered His Wife (Video) 
 
 Like some mix of “Scenes from a Marriage” and “Ace in The Hole” as shot by Michael Mann with a Hitchcock Blonde to kill (or die) for in the lead, “Gone Girl” tells the story of Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike). The film begins in New Carthage, Mo., on their fifth anniversary; Nick runs a few errands and blows off some steam, returning home to find an empty house, an upended coffee table shattered in the living room, and no sign of Amy. 
 
 When the cops (played by the superb Kim Dickens and a mostly silent but excellent Patrick Fugit) arrive, it’s clear there’s been a struggle inside the Dunne’s house; as Nick and Amy narrate their marriage to us and the police investigate an ever-increasing number of clues, though, it’s clear there were signs of struggle inside the Dunne’s marriage as well. 
 
 Made up of police inquiries and diary entries, love stories and other fake-outs, “Gone Girl” is, in no small part, a story about storytelling and the difference between perception and reality, with comforting tales interrupted by the low, ominous thud of the metaphorical other shoe dropping. Amy’s mom and dad are best-selling authors of children’s books, with their series “Amazing Amy” an improved version of their daughter’s life; Nick and Amy’s American dream marriage with the big house and the big love looks is utterly perfect until you shake it and the rot comes spilling out. 
 
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 And when upsetting revelations come out in the case, celebrity defense attorney Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry, a natural as a hearty, likable cynic with great media presence) smoothly states how “We’ll have to … realign the public’s perception …” 
 
 Flynn’s script is loaded with nicely-tuned observations, not just about the rules and rituals of the modern American marriage but also about a media that shrieks speculation more than it speaks the truth and worries about slogans more than facts. The author’s clever, cruel and cool work also gives Pike the role of a lifetime in the shining, secretive Amy, while still making her human and comprehensible. Affleck, who’s personally had to endure a level of media scrutiny that makes a colonoscopy look dignified, brings much of that history to Nick’s affability and desire to please. When he needs to play the part, Nick does, but he’s not as smart as he thinks he is. Both performers are brilliant. 
 
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 With its shifting perspectives and timelines, its constant conflict between what’s said and what’s truly seen, “Gone Girl” is clean, clear, and perfectly constructed. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth and editor Jeff Baxter, both regular Fincher collaborators, deliver the kind of work that looks easy but, assuredly and on reflection, is decidedly not. The score, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is a more mixed proposition, effective in the places it works and distracting on several occasions where it doesn’t. 
 
 The supporting cast is a thing of wonder — there are familiar faces like Dickens, Fugit, and Perry all pushed to greatness, with Missi Pyle perfect as the film’s version of harridan-for-justice Nancy Grace, Neil Patrick Harris elegantly worrisome as on old suitor of Amy’s, and Carrie Coon (“The Leftovers”) a revelation as Nick’s loving, tough sister Margot. 
 
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 The best Hitchcock films struck a balance between elegance and violence, a peculiar mix of champagne fizz and spilled crimson blood; “Gone Girl,” with its giddy revelations and grim-grin reversals incorporating ugly facts and uglier fictions, fits perfectly into a modernized version of that superb tradition. 
 
 “Gone Girl” portrays marriage not just as warfare by other means but as many different kinds of battle — class conflict, sexual gamesmanship, wrangling over money, fighting over the future — with plenty of blood spilled. That’s part of what makes it as damned good as it is; “Gone Girl” is that rare entertainment that rewards your intelligence instead of insulting it, that rare thriller interested in emotional wounds as much as physical ones. 
 
 “Gone Girl” will earn plenty of loud shouts of applause, awed sounds of surprise, and shocked laughter, but what makes it worthy of them is all the hushed, uneasy conversations it’s guaranteed to inspire in the long, unsettled silence to come after. ||||| Three happy marriages, beginning to crack; three dissatisfied blondes; and, crawling out from the cracks, the thought of violent crime. Such is the substance of three new films, all derived from works by popular authors. The longest is “Gone Girl,” adapted by Gillian Flynn from her own novel; the most nattily dressed is “The Two Faces of January,” taken from Patricia Highsmith; and last, courtesy of Georges Simenon, comes “The Blue Room,” the Frenchest of the three, so much so that the plot relies on confiture de prunes. 
 
 “Gone Girl,” directed by David Fincher, starts with Nick (Ben Affleck)—in his own words, “a corn-fed, salt-of-the-earth Missouri boy.” He used to live in New York and write for magazines, but the work dried up and he returned home, to the uneventful town of North Carthage, with his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike). According to your point of view (and the film is all about viewpoints, and the urge to shuffle them around), Amy is one or more of the following: the inspiration for the “Amazing Amy” series of children’s books, written by her parents; a flat-out dazzler, too cool for the neighborhood; a rich kid, spawned by a snotty family; the original desperate housewife, becalmed and unadored; or a heap of trouble—the Clytemnestra of the Midwest. Oh, and another thing. She may be dead. 
 
 Nick owns a bar with his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon), and he stops there one morning for an early Scotch. He then drives home to find the front door open, a glass table smashed, and no sign of his wife. Their cat is a witness, but, if it knows anything, it’s not coughing up. The police arrive, and Detective Boney (Kim Dickens) declares a missing-persons case; before long, Nick is knee-deep in press conferences, candlelit vigils, and public appeals, flashing a polite, reluctant grin that is parsed, by tabloids and TV hosts, as proof of guilt. (You can’t blame them. The Affleck smile, from the dawn of his career, has looked more creepy than consolatory—softening that firm, all-American jaw but never quite reaching the eyes.) Suddenly, after an hour, we flip to Amy, and to her version of what happened—so different, and so close to wacko, that it seems like another story altogether. I would happily unveil the rest of it, but, in deference to the twenty-one people who have yet to read the novel, I will say nothing more without a lawyer present. 
 
 At first blush, “Gone Girl” is natural Fincherland. Not geographically; he seems less absorbed in North Carthage, described by Amy as “the navel of the country,” than he was in the California of “Zodiac” or the Harvard of “The Social Network.” Those are his masterpieces: the two movies that I can’t not watch when they turn up on TV, and the two occasions on which his pedantry and his paranoia have fused together, engrossing us in a crazed aggregation of detail. Nothing could equip him better for the coiled and clustered goings on in the new film, and, for good measure, he has hired Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, whom he last used for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” to compose the score. They don’t let him down. “Gone Girl” boasts one major act of savagery, drenched in a downpour of blood, and what we hear during it sounds like the wah-wah pedal of Satan. So why doesn’t the movie claw us as “The Social Network” did? Who could have predicted that a film about murder, betrayal, and deception would be less exciting than a film about a Web site? 
 
 The glum fact is that “Gone Girl” lacks clout where it needs it most, at its core. We are accustomed to Fincher’s heroes being as obsessively smart as he is, if lacking his overarching patience, whereas Nick remains, to put it gently, a lunkhead. Amy has twice the brain, and ten times the cunning, but, despite the best efforts of Rosamund Pike, her character, onscreen as on the page, feels cooked up rather than lived in. That can work on film, as shown by another beauty, Gene Tierney, in “Laura” and “Leave Her to Heaven,” but the scheming of Tierney’s heroines was matched by a rare, ornate febrility in the movies themselves. Fincher’s method, on the other hand, is dogged and downbeat, so that Amy sticks out like a cartoon in a newsreel. (One expected the same of the title character in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” who was equally extreme, but somehow Rooney Mara gave her life—all drilled intensity where Pike offers elegant drift.) “Gone Girl” is meant to inspire debates about whether Amy is victimized or vengeful, and whether Nick deserves everything he gets, but, really, who cares? All I could think of was the verdict of Samuel Butler on Thomas Carlyle: “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four.” Or, in the words of Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry), Nick’s unflappable attorney: “You two are the most fucked-up people I have ever met, and I specialize in fucked-up people.” 
 
 Perry has a grand time. His wave to the press corps, camped out on Nick’s sidewalk, is a cool mixture of dismissal and salute. He knows that our attention is straying from the main couple toward the outlying figures: Tanner himself, Detective Boney, and, best of all, Margo—a fine performance, both grounded and wounded, from Carrie Coon. Against that, we have Desi (Neil Patrick Harris), a wealthy ex of Amy’s, wandering in as if from another film, and eating up the final slice of the action with a silly Gothic subplot. It comes straight from the novel, and you can picture the outcry if Fincher had chopped or changed it, but so what? A director’s task is not to suck up to readers, or to flatter his source, but to imagine it afresh, as film, while seizing on those aspects that matter to him most. What grabs Fincher about “Gone Girl,” I suspect, is not the mystery in Missouri but the sight of a media wolf pack in full cry. Hence the time that he devotes to two cable-TV hosts, played by Sela Ward and Missi Pyle, who rifle through Nick’s privacy, and his state of mind, in their lust for a story. Fincher is right: these days they are the story, and I wish that he would tell it again from their angle, through the eyes of bloggers, and via the phones of the people we see laughing outside Nick’s bar, taking selfies at a hot spot of fame. So, “Gone Girl Redux”: the campaign starts here. ||||| 3.5 stars (out of 4) Check your nerves at the theater door. Take a deep breath while you still can. And then calmly apologize in advance to the person sitting next to you for jumping out of your seat and clutching a stray hand for dear life. 
 
 There. Now you’re ready to partake in some terrifying fun. 
 
 Producer J.J. Abrams is trumpeting his latest Bad Robot project as a sort-of sibling to 2008’s creepy found-footage hit Cloverfield. But this pic is more of a blood relative to the claustrophobic thrills and dark humor of the 1990 classic Misery. And no, you don’t have to be familiar with the mothership movie to fully understand — and appreciate — this sharp and tightly wound winner. 
 
 The scares start before a single line of dialogue is uttered. With ominous music taunting us in the background, we see a twenty-something girl (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) flitting around in an empty apartment. She walks out in a huff, leaving a diamond ring on a table. While driving on a desolate highway, her boyfriend, Ben, calls her on the iPhone and pleads forgiveness. (Check the closing credits to ID the A-lister who supplies Ben's voice). And then … boom. 
 
 This was a highly clandestine production for a reason: Part of the beauty of the film is that you don’t know what the heck is going on, and you don’t want to know. So plot details shall be kept to a minimum. 
 
 These are just the necessary basics: 
 
 — The girl is named Michelle. She wakes up and finds herself handcuffed to a bed in a cellar, which is part of a large, tricked-out underground bunker. It looks strikingly similar to Desmond's hatch in Lost. (Hey, let's pretend that Abrams, a Lost cocreator, is giving a subtle wink to all the show's fans!). Anyway, Michelle wants out. 
 
 — Her gruff caretaker, Howard (John Goodman), is a self-professed survivalist. He explains to Michelle that she can’t leave because the country is “under attack,” and the air is polluted. She needs to stay in the enclosed space for one year. Minimum. 
 
 — Another person, a good-natured dude named Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), is also staying on the premises. He claims he is there of his own free will. 
 
 As the suspense heightens, the dynamic between the three characters in these ultraconfining surroundings constantly changes. At any given moment, Howard could either be a trustworthy father figure or a deeply disturbed kook. He adores his '60s ditties on the jukebox, which is endearing. He has a thing for Pretty in Pink too. Duckie! Blane! How sinister can he be? Then again, he also has a shotgun and a short-fused temper. Never mind. He’s a lunatic. Right? 
 
 What an inspired choice to cast Goodman as the man in charge. Though not a traditional leading man, the underrated actor has crafted a career by playing a relatable everyman. He has been a good guy (Roseanne, Argo), a loveable goof (The Flinstones), a bully (Revenge of the Nerds) and honed his comic skills hosting Saturday Night Live roughly 33 times. There’s a comfort in seeing him on screen, even when he’s biting off the ear of a goon in The Big Lebowski. We want to believe he’s being honest with Michelle when he laments the loss of his daughter. But only a fool would underestimate him. And Winstead — in a breakthrough performance — does not play scrappy, quick-thinking Michelle as a fool. 
 
 (Winstead's mental strength is a key cog in the triangle. Nobody wants to root for an idiotic damsel-in-distress). 
 
 It bears repeating: Don’t try to outguess the narrative. And, for the love of Google, don’t scour the web for third-act spoilers. Just exult in knowing that an old-fashioned scary movie can still make you squirm, laugh and gasp for air. 
 
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– "Chilling," "unsettling," and "manipulative" is what critics are saying about Gone Girl, starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as Nick and Amy, a husband and wife trying to make it in a small town in Missouri—just the type of descriptors you probably want for a mystery-thriller about what happens when Nick becomes a suspect in Amy's sudden disappearance. Here's what the critics have to say: For Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle, the movie starts off "brilliant, not just a triumph of story but of strategy," and maintains that momentum throughout … until the last 20 minutes. That's when LaSalle says the movie "frays"—a "Swiss watch of storytelling [that] turns into a bad digital clock circa 1986, flashing the wrong numbers." He praises the acting, especially that of Pike, proclaiming that "everyone who sees Gone Girl will walk out raving about" her. Manohla Dargis is similarly thrown off by the shift midway through the film, writing for the New York Times that "by the movie's second half, you may wish that Amy would stay gone." Although Dargis concedes that David "Fincher's compositions, camera work, and cutting are, as always, superbly controlled," she adds that the film "plays like a queasily, at times gleefully, funny horror movie about a modern marriage." But evenutally, "dread descends like winter shadows, darkening the movie's tone and visuals until it's snuffed out all the light, air, and nuance." James Rocchi writes at The Wrap that Fincher's humor is "the spoonful of sugar that helps the malevolence go down in his films," and Gone Girl is no exception, with "top-notch suspenseful storytelling" and "razor-edged wit." He also lauds the supporting cast (including Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry) as "a thing of wonder" and praises the movie overall as "that rare entertainment that rewards your intelligence instead of insulting it, that rare thriller interested in emotional wounds as much as physical ones." But Gone Girl isn't as alluring as Fincher's The Social Network, laments Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, asking: "Who could have predicted that a film about murder, betrayal, and deception would be less exciting than a film about a website?" The film that Lane at first calls "natural Fincherland" soon devolves into a movie that "lacks clout." He also can't help but note that Gone Girl is "meant to inspire debates about whether Amy is victimized or vengeful, and whether Nick deserves everything he gets, but, really, who cares?"