Gone Girl

Have we misunderstood David Fincher?

The trailer for David Fincher’s latest movie, the hitman thriller The Killer, promises that admirers of one of cinema’s most talented directors will be getting their money’s worth, whether they see it during its theater release or wait for it to premiere on Netflix (which paid for it), just as they did Fincher’s previous film, Mank, and his serial-killer series Mindhunter. There will be a lead performance by Michael Fassbender — returning from several years away from the big screen racing cars — that will, as usual, combine icy charisma with brute physicality. There will be impressively gloomy cinematography, courtesy of Erik Messerschmidt.

Femmes fatales in fiction and life

In her memoir written from a prison in New York, Dorothy Daniels gives readers a whistle-stop tour of “flashy female psychopaths” who have existed throughout history. Daniels is a food critic and a cannibal, a woman who exhibits an acute awareness of her own commercial value as a true-crime story. Before being caught by police, she considered the most humiliating moment in her life to be when she was fired from the masthead of a popular food-and-drink magazine: an experience, she bemoans, that belongs to “ordinary people.” Dorothy Daniels is, of course, fictional.

psychopath