The movie industry decided to take a couple of months off after Guardians of the Galaxy came out on August 1. After all, why would anybody want to sit in a movie theater during the dog days of late summer? But now we’re into the busiest quarter of the year, so the good movies are back, starting with David Fincher’s commercial thriller Gone Girl, with Ben Affleck as a Scott Peterson-type being tried on a Nancy Grace-like cable news show over the disappearance of his lovely wife.

Affleck has been on a mission for a number of years to revive movies that couples over the age of 25 would pay to see in the theaters (such as his own Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and Argo), and Gone Girl is a worthy addition to the list. This time, expert gun-for-hire David Fincher (The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) directs. Affleck plays the ideal role for himself as a handsome guy whose acting and PR chops are almost as good as his looks, but maybe not quite, with disastrous implications … Any parallels to the flame-out of Affleck’s leading man career in the Gigli era of a decade ago are no doubt conscious.

The clever source novel by authoress Gillian Flynn is a like a higher IQ gender-flipped version of author Stieg Larsson’s preposterous Dragon Tattoo anti-white male fantasies about evil men who get what’s coming to them. Gone Girl is smarter than Fincher’s Dragon Tattoo, but as the twists pile up, it gets somewhat comic, although more intentionally than Dragon Tattoo. (I’m being obscure here to avoid spoilers. To see why a certain persuasion are angry at Ms. Flynn, see here.)

A couple of warnings: Trent (Nine-Inch Nails) Reznor’s mood music starts out distractingly louder than the dialogue, but eventually you figure out that Fincher had a reason for that. The literary references to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer (e.g, the movie is set in “North Carthage, Missouri” — Sam Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri) don’t seem to lead anywhere.

I found it thoroughly interesting, although not notably thrilling. There isn’t much edge of your seat excitement.