Run time: 113 mins

David Fincher’s icy thriller follows an assassin battling both his employers and himself.

A fastidious gunman (Michael Fassbender) describes his painstaking process as he prepares to make a hit in Paris, patiently watching and waiting for the right moment. After it goes wrong, he heads home to his hideout in the Dominican Republic, where he finds his girlfriend has been brutally assaulted. To get to the bottom of it, he pays visits to his lawyer in New Orleans, a thug in Florida and an expert in New York, before heading to Chicago to face his client. Each stop is a life or death situation.

Played out in a series of carefully planned set-pieces, each of these episodes unfolds with its own distinct blending of dry humour, grim determination and cold-blooded brutality. It’s an entertaining concoction that is hugely watchable thanks to Fassbender, who brings his full-bodied energy to the role, particularly a voiceover narration that plays out like a rather sinister Ted Talk.

Churning skilfully through action, intrigue and pitch-black drama, it’s a sturdy return to the genre which made Fincher’s name.