NEW YORK: New York Film Festival kicked off on Friday with the world premiere of David Fincher’s “Gone Girl,” a thriller adapted from Gillian Flynn’s best-selling novel.

On Oct. 4, Paul Thomas Anderson’s stab at translating Thomas Pynchon to the screen, “Inherent Vice,” with Joaquin Phoenix, will premiere at the festival’s centerpiece.

With a finely curated main slate of about 30 features, as well as a particularly robust documentary sidebar, a batch of restored revivals and a retrospective of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (“Cleopatra,” “Guys and Dolls“), the two-week festival is, as ever, a cinephile’s dream of big-screen delights. But the gala screenings of Fincher’s and Anderson’s latest films cast long shadows over even the most illustrious of programs.

“You’re talking about two of the most genuinely visionary talents in cinema,” says Kent Jones, director of the festival. “They’re both L.A.-based, yes, but they have very different ideas about what it is to tell a story, about what a movie is, about the image.”

There’s little that obviously binds them except for their high regard and — even in period films — their electric contemporariness. Fincher, the director of “Se7en,” “Fight Club” and “The Social Network” (which also opened the NYFF in 2010), has regularly plumbed the darkest depths of psychology with cool precision. Anderson (“Magnolia,” “There Will Be Blood“), on the other hand, is a student of Robert Altman and embraces a deliberately looser approach, building his films organically.

In “Gone Girl,” Affleck stars as a husband under the suspicious glare of the media and the scrutiny of the police when his wife (Rosamund Pike) goes missing.