Gone Girl (2014)
Director: David Fincher
Genre: Thriller/screwball romantic comedy for sickos
Notable cast: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Tyler Perry, Carrie Coon, Neil Patrick Harris, Kim Dickens, Patrick Fugit, Emily Ratajkowski, Lola Kirke, Boyd Holbrook, Sela Ward, Missi Pyle, Scoot McNairy, and Casey Wilson
MPA rating: R
Rotten Tomatoes: 88%
Metacritic: 79
Gillian Flynn’s fiction phenomenon turns into a morbidly hilarious masterwork in the hands of cinema’s most sophisticated misanthrope, David Fincher. A career-best Ben Affleck stars as a husband whose wife (an Oscar-nominated Rosamund Pike) disappears shortly after they relocate to Missouri, igniting a media circus that points to him as the perpetrator. With wild casting choices that include Tyler Perry and Neil Patrick Harris, Fincher has an awful lot of fun weaponizing our perceptions of his cast and the people they play, all building to a series of shocking twists. “As his film veers into wilder, weirder territory, Fincher lets the mannered menace of the first half give way to a mounting sense of chaotic doom,” said Vanity Fair, calling Pike’s work “a star-makingly good performance, spellbinding in its operatic mix of tones and temperatures.”
Hamnet (2025)
Director: Chloé Zhao
Genre: Drama
Notable cast: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn, Jacobi Jupe, Noah Jupe, and David Wilmot
MPA rating: PG-13
Rotten Tomatoes: 87%
Metacritic: 84
Following up her Oscar-winning Nomadland (also currently on Netflix!) and the COVID-era Marvel misfire Eternals, director Chloé Zhao returned to movie screens last year with this look at the tragedy that befell William Shakespeare’s family and inspired his greatest work. As the Bard’s wife, Agnes, Jessie Buckley delivers an emotionally devastating performance that earned her a best-actress Oscar along with an ocean’s worth of audience tears. “It was the most fluid, creative, immediate film experience I’ve had,” Buckley told Vanity Fair. “Whatever Agnes represented as a woman and in relation to nature and to her children and to life and death…I found that very intense.” But beyond the film’s fictionalized recounting of the Shakespeare family, it also achieves something unexpected: Its conclusion reminds us of storytelling’s power to bring people together in a shared emotional experience.
Happy as Lazzaro (2018)
Director: Alice Rohrwacher
Genre: Drama
Notable cast: Adriano Tardiolo, Sergi López, and Alba Rohrwacher
MPA rating: PG-13
Rotten Tomatoes: 91%
Metacritic: 87
Director Alice Rohrwacher earned a legion of new fans from 2023’s Josh O’Conner–led La Chimera—but prior to that masterpiece, she made another with this idiosyncratic fable. Another foray into symbolic magical realism, the story of frozen-in-time sweetheart farmhand Lazzaro is used by Rohwacher to weave a magical examination of class and exploitation. Around its midpoint, the film takes a daring leap that recontextualizes everything we have seen as more than meets the eye, setting the tender Lazzaro on a course for tragedy to come. It’s one of Rohrwacher’s bespoke visual wonders that seem to commune with some kind of cinematic deity, casting a spell that lingers long after viewing.
