I strongly recommend the new movie Gone Girl. It’s an amazing achievement, really: a 149-minute suspense movie that remains captivating and suspenseful throughout. Almost always, when a thriller lasts longer than a couple of hours, one of two things happens: 1) there is too much narrative bloat and therefore the story drags; 2) there are too many twists, and the need to think up further ones leads to a loss of credibility by the final turn (clever gives way to too-clever-by-half, which gives way to too-clever-by-three-quarters, which gives way to stupid). Gone Girl avoids both pitfalls, and offers a thoroughly satisfying script and excellent performances by Ben Affleck, Kim Dickens, and Tyler Perry (yes, that Tyler Perry, the Madea guy; he’s sharp and funny as a celebrity defense attorney).

In this excellent review, Sonny Bunch warns that there might be an Oscar-season backlash claiming that the film is misogynist. He’s right to be worried: Hollywood, even more than the D.C. political class, loves to take things out of context. For what it’s worth, the charge, should it be made, would be wrong and unfair: Part of the movie has the basic structure of the typical the-masculine-male-is-the-villain plot (think of Lifetime movies), another part is the typical the-evil-designing-woman-is-the-villain plot (think of film noir passim, or anti-feminist parables), but the film is not reducible to either. Also: The two characters I found most appealing – the main character’s sister (played by Carrie Coon), and the local cop (Kim Dickens) — were both strong, independent women.

So, overall: strongly recommended. But if you happen to be going through tough relationship issues at the moment, you should probably not see this movie right now; it risks making you paranoid. (A bonus recommendation: Gone Girl director David Fincher’s 2007 movie Zodiac. I generally dislike the genre of serial-killer movies; that one was a keeper.)