Gone Girl 2014

Critics score:
88 / 100

Reviews provided by RottenTomatoes

Christy Lemire, ChristyLemire.com: This is the most elegant, exquisitely made trash. Read more

Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times: This is a nutty film, and for the most part I mean that in a good way. Read more

Wesley Morris, Grantland: Gone Girl is a sick movie, but it's a lumbering, anti-imaginative kind of sick. Read more

Jake Coyle, Associated Press: In good times and bad, in sickness and in health, Gone Girl is delicious suburban noir. Read more

Lou Lumenick, New York Post: Glossy, empty and ultimately unsatisfying - if undeniably entertaining ... Read more

Rex Reed, New York Observer: Preposterous, illogical, senselessly over-plotted and artificial as a ceramic artichoke ... one of the year's grossest disappointments. Read more

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: [Pike is] a star presence here from her very first scene; it's even rewarding, given her expressive voice, to hear her reading from Amy's diary entries. Read more

Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times: It's dark, it's creepy and it's very good - both on the page, and on the screen. Read more

Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine: In a movie of subtle tones and wild swerves, Pike expertly mixes a cocktail of hot and cold blood. She is the Amazing Amy you could fall for, till death do you part. Read more

Justin Chang, Variety: Director David Fincher and stars Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck are at the top of their game in this mesmerizing adaptation of Gillian Flynn's novel. Read more

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, AV Club: Gone Girl isn't a movie about marriage or relationships or men and women, but about the way people assume established, familiar archetypes to please, manipulate, and entrap one another. Read more

Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic: Long story short: The movie absolutely lives up to the hype. Read more

Mark Feeney, Boston Globe: The characters sound like people trying to sound like people in the movies and not quite pulling it off. Read more

J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: Gillian Flynn's twist-laden mystery novel gets a somber, respectful screen treatment from David Fincher, which has the unfortunate effect of diminishing the book's diabolical fun and heightening its dull misanthropy. Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: It's everything the book was and more - more, certainly, in its sinister, brackish atmosphere dominated by mustard-yellow fluorescence, designed to make you squint, recoil and then lean in a little closer. Read more

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: The film's stabs at social commentary -- the constant barrage of tabloid TV coverage -- are crushingly obvious. Read more

Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News: Gone Girl thrives on enigma, and the leads embody that quality to wonderful effect. Read more

Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post: Once you release the movie from the demand that it be significant, there are a number of achievements. Read more

Adam Graham, Detroit News: It's sick fun that leaves a scar; popcorn entertainment that bites back. Dig in. Read more

Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly: Anyone who loved Gone Girl the book will walk out of Gone Girl the movie with a sick grin on their face. Read more

Kate Erbland, Film.com: Gone Girl is a rare bird: a tricky, weird mystery that benefits from people knowing its twist from the outset. Read more

Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter: A sharply made, perfectly cast and unfailingly absorbing melodrama. Read more

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: "Gone Girl" shows the remarkable things that can happen when filmmaker and material are this well matched. Read more

Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News: Pike is a revelation. The actress ... demonstrates versatility with compelling eyes that can instantly switch from innocent to detached. Oscar consideration is certainly a possibility for her. Read more

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: Even knowing what's ahead doesn't prepare you for the movie's tone, which is funny yet curdled and cynical and bleak. Read more

David Thomson, The New Republic: Gone Girl promises to be an unnerving portrait of marriage as ruin, but then it opts for madness and implausibility. Read more

Rafer Guzman, Newsday: Gillian Flynn's playful novel is now David Fincher's chilling movie. Still packed with twists and turns, but the overall effect is unsettling. Read more

Anthony Lane, New Yorker: 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? Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: Believe me, you should see the movie, and then you can talk about it all night. And you probably will. Read more

Bob Mondello, NPR: In the film's final stages [Fincher] seems to be relying entirely on craft - but, boy, is it effective craft. Read more

Linda Holmes, NPR: If the production is slightly too atmospheric, the performances are bracingly specific, led by Affleck, whose task is complex. Read more

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: A break-all-the-windows plot-twister that keeps every jolt and (most of) the cultural jabs from Gillian Flynn's blockbuster novel. Read more

Manohla Dargis, New York Times: As sometimes happens in Mr. Fincher's work, dread descends like winter shadows, darkening the movie's tone and visuals until it's snuffed out all the light, air and nuance. Read more

Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer: Gone Girl presents a deft mix of whodunit and who-you-gonna-believe? Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: 145 minutes of riveting drama and surprises. Read more

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: David Fincher's shockingly good film version of Gone Girl is the date-night movie of the decade for couples who dream of destroying one another. Expect a stampede at the box office. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: It's a work of chilly wit and bleak metaphor, an artifice that invites the kind of analytical response where we pull on our chins and discuss how other people, more naive than we, will receive it. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: Director David Fincher lands a tone for Gone Girl that's broad and precise enough to encourage a series of witty performances within the thriller framework. Read more

Dana Stevens, Slate: A deliciously manipulative mystery that toys with the viewer like a femme fatale with her prey. Read more

Graydon Royce, Minneapolis Star Tribune: Flynn's great accomplishment, in her book and here, is an unstinting dedication to plot mechanics that jar our balance. Read more

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Ultimately what makes "Gone Girl" so watchable is the three-headed monster of Fincher, Pike and Affleck. Read more

Christopher Orr, The Atlantic: Fincher is as Fincher does. And what Fincher does better than almost anyone is create moody, meticulously crafted thrillers that straddle the divide between genre and art. Read more

Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail: Fans of Flynn's 2012 novel will not be one tiny bit disappointed. Read more

Peter Howell, Toronto Star: David Fincher's Gone Girl takes a big beach read about a troubled marriage and turns it into a suspenseful screen indictment of modern times. Read more

James Rocchi, TheWrap: "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. Read more

Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out: The stealthiest comedy since American Psycho. Read more

Claudia Puig, USA Today: Gone Girl is to marriage what Fatal Attraction was to infidelity. Read more

Stephanie Zacharek, Village Voice: The movie, while entertaining and extremely well crafted, is too self-conscious about its depravity to be either truly disturbing or disturbingly funny. Ticking along with metronome-like efficiency, it's more slick than sick. Read more

David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: The movie is phenomenally gripping-although it does leave you queasy, uncertain what to take away on the subject of men, women, marriage, and the possibility of intimacy from the example of such prodigiously messed-up people. Read more

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post: "Gone Girl" may get the job done as a dutiful, deliberately paced procedural, but it never quite makes the splash it could have as a thoughtful, timely and thoroughly bracing plunge. Read more