A long and twisty argument for the notion that somewhere along the way, talented, high-style director David Fincher stopped liking people: the characters onscreen, the souls in the theater, even the abstract mass of humanity. Pathology still interests him, though, and so we get toxic parents, toxic lovers, toxic siblings, toxic friendships, and a toxic cultural swamp in which they can all go about the nasty business of living. The story tells of a below-average guy (Ben Affleck, hulking and yet expressive) whose wife (Rosamund Pike, lean and impassive) goes missing "under suspicious circumstances," intertwined first with the tale of their gradually curdling romance and then with an account of "what really happened." Fincher's chief delight seems to be in playing with genre conventions: what looks like an especially moody whodunit morphs first into a psychosexual thriller and then into what might just be straight-faced (and utterly black-hearted) satire. With Tyler Perry as a surprisingly human celebrity lawyer. (2014) — Matthew Lickona