Mank

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

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.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

The journalists who scripted the golden age of Hollywood

From our UK edition

When talkies appeared in 1927, Hollywood went searching for talkers to write them. It turned to men like Herman J. Mankiewicz: to journalists. The greatest screenwriters of the golden age were journalists first; unlike novelists, they thrived in Hollywood — at least professionally. Good films and good journalism need brevity; novels don’t. Reading about F. Scott Fitzgerald struggling at MGM, 12 years after The Great Gatsby, is brutal, like trying to watch a man learn to walk. The film Mank, by David Fincher, tells the story of how Mankiewicz and Orson Welles created Citizen Kane — for which they shared an Oscar for the screenplay in 1942 — and how they bickered over the credit.