Variety is reporting that David Fincher’s highly-anticipated thriller Gone Girl will open the New York Film Festival on September 26. By this time, Telluride will have happened and the picture for Best Picture will be a little more clear. Gone Girl is based on the bestselling (still bestselling) novel by Gillian Flynn and has been adapted for the screen by Flynn herself. So far, she is the only woman entering this year’s Oscar race as the sole screenwriter. Since the story is filtered through the perceptions of its two unreliable narrators, the trick for the very visual Fincher is to put all that twisted internal psychology up on screen. Audiences at the NYFCC sometimes tend to approach movies from the wrong angle, as they did with both Life of Pi and Hugo — two films that received the brunt of over-zealous analysis. A lot of faulty perceptions were reversed after more critics and industry people saw the films. It’s important to take that first festival reaction — or any first reaction anywhere to any movie — with a grain of salt. I always do, until I see the film for myself. If the Manhattan premiere of Les Miserables taught us anything, it was not to trust opening-night emotions — although the film did go on to win three Oscars, more than Lincoln, as many as Argo. So go perhaps that standing ovation the afternoon Les Mis debuted did manage to push the film farther than it would have ordinarily gone has there not been that rapturous first response.
“Gone Girl” opens nationwide on Oct. 3.
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