A dozen years have passed since “Shame,” in which Michael Fass bender played an unappeasable sex addict named Brandon, and I remember wondering, back then, what Brandon would do once the juice ran dry. Sell real estate, perhaps? Get married, raise three kids, and work on his short game on weekends? Another possibility is suggested by “The Killer,” a new film from David Fincher, in which Fassbender— still lean and staring, spookily unchanged by time—takes the role of a professional assassin. I can’t prove anything, but I suspect that he is Brandon reloaded. From picking up strangers on the subway to picking them off with a silenced rifle, through a hotel window, is just a hop and a skip.
Fassbender is one of those actors who seem alone even when they’re in company. He specializes in the hard, the hollow, and the robotic, and the anonymous figure he plays in “The Killer”—which is based on a multivolume graphic novel by Alexis Nolent—spends the first half hour or so in monkish solitude. He waits in empty rooms on the top floor of an apartment building, in Paris, preparing to shoot someone across the way. He has a gun, a telescopic sight, and a watch that measures his pulse. (No trigger should be squeezed until the rate drops below sixty.) Determined to leave no trace, he wears gloves at all times and dozes on a workbench as if it were an operating table. And, in voice-over, he talks to us.
Esta historia es de la edición November 06, 2023 de The New Yorker.
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Esta historia es de la edición November 06, 2023 de The New Yorker.
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INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.