Every David Fincher movie, ranked

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button lives up to its name, a technical wonder that elicits nothing of the sort. It is a meaningful fable about the meaninglessness of life told through Brad Pitt’s uncanny gaze, programmed to perpetual wonderment as he watches the people around him die. Fincher pulls hard at the heartstrings, tying knots he can’t untangle around his magical boy Benjamin (Pitt) and the woman who loves him, Daisy (a superb Cate Blanchett). Tucked within a death-bedtime story, told to a dying Daisy by her daughter (Julia Ormond) at the onset of Hurricane Katrina (not helping Button’s reductive racial politics), Benjamin’s backward-aging odyssey meanders through a melancholic tour of the 20th century. Despite the amber glow of Fincher’s remarkable New Orleans, Button’s artifice and narrative layers are purposefully distancing, allowing this tediously grim fairy tale to stumble upon moments of eerie grace and beauty. Fincher and screenwriter Eric Roth attempted an anti-Forrest Gump that unfortunately can’t escape Gump’s shadow, recycling stereotypes, folksy witticisms, and plot beats from Roth’s Oscar-winner. Pitt’s awestruck eyes buckling under the digital prosthetics is a fascinating prism to view Fincher’s thematic interests, but it isn’t always a rewarding one.

David Fincher drew blueprints for TV procedurals and true-crime podcasts with Seven and Zodiac; The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo follows them. Dragon Tattoo’s downbeat mystery keeps things slow and steady, trudging through the icy tundra of labyrinthine exposition and forgone conclusions. The director stuffs his adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s bestseller with immaculate production design, a killer Reznor and Ross score, and World War II subtext, yet no tension. Trading Seven’s darkness for snow-blind noir, there are few surprises in the bright landscape or in Steven Zaillian’s hefty script. As disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist, star Daniel Craig contorts his James Bond charm into a computer-illiterate investigator hired to solve a Nazi family’s decades-old cold case. This is Lisbeth Salander’s movie, however, and Rooney Mara delivers an uncompromising punk twist on the director’s oeuvre of outsiders, even if her arc mostly feels like a digression. Unfortunately, Fincher devotes the movie’s overlong finale to proving she’s more than Blomkvist’s edgy muse, but he never quite succeeds. Without a doubt the best movie named The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo ever made, it’s nevertheless Fincher’s least successful thriller.

David Fincher’s first film was as doomed as its outlook. Released six years after James Cameron’s blockbuster Aliens, Fox didn’t care what happened in Alien³ as long as the film came out. The production was so rife with studio meddling that it was “a truly fucked up situation” in Fincher’s estimation, and it begat a truly fucked up movie. Opening with the vicious retconning of the previous film’s child star and love interest, the movie descends from there, cutting into the kid’s corpse with a bone cutter. Somehow, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) crash-landed on a worse hell for her latest Sisyphean nightmare, a prison populated by identical inmates at the “ass-end of space.” Her fatalistic quest mirrors Fincher’s as she fails to rally her stubborn captors around a shared goal. Whether that goal is “making a good movie” or “killing an alien,” Fincher manifests pure misery through a rust-colored milieu of blood, sweat, and grease, scored by Elliot Goldenthal’s dissonant soundtrack. Though neither fun nor particularly entertaining, Alien³ is far better than its reputation and reveals a simple truth about the series: A life spent alongside an alien isn’t worth living.

At this point, everyone has talked about Fight Club to death. Though debate around the movie continues, thanks partly to Fincher’s overstuffed satire and an unwieldy second half that’s at odds with the first, Fight Club remains an unforgettable portrait of male alienation that sits comfortably between Taxi Driver and Beau Is Afraid. Tired of searching for meaning in the Ikea catalog, our Narrator (Edward Norton) undergoes a rapid devolution after meeting the coolest guy on Earth, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who thinks our Narrator is really smart and funny. From there, the movie ruthlessly deconstructs what it means to be a man without actual problems, where he can show up to work covered in blood, snarl at co-workers, and get away with it. Norton’s grievance spouter is the raging id of toxic masculinity: A guy who starts a hate group because a woman has similar (albeit very strange) interests to his. The violence is brutal, as Fincher captures every scrape with the sound of flesh grinding against concrete and knuckles, but there’s also a connection forged. Shots of the boys, sweaty and shirtless, hugging and smiling, remind us what’s missing from their life: Community and how that need can be weaponized. If only these guys could open up and talk about Fight Club.

Like The Game, Panic Room gets lost in Fincher’s filmography, but the movie’s “for hire” tag belies its inventiveness. Even ignoring the previz innovations and impossible camera tricks, Panic Room is a tightly wound Hitchcockian success. Following the burn-it-down ballyhoo of Fight Club, Fincher set tight limitations for Panic Room, restricting the action to a four-story Manhattan brownstone with a special room. Fincher reconfigures Alien³ through this claustrophobic thriller about Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) protecting her daughter (Kristen Stewart) from the post-9/11 paranoia creeping into her new dwellings. Instead of a Xenomorph, a trio of Coen-esque home invaders—a motormouth rich kid (played by a cornrowed Jared Leto), a tightlipped menace from Queens (Dwight Yoakam), and a conflicted and sympathetic home security expert (Forest Whitaker)—volley for control of the titular room and the millions of dollars hidden inside. Fincher ratchets up the suspense by using everything the house offers, whether it be a security camera, an unexpected ex-husband, or a mini-fridge filled with insulin. A rare thriller that doesn’t need a twist (though, in this case, a happy ending from Fincher certainly is one), Panic Room gets it done like a professional.

Perhaps the most unfairly maligned movie in his filmography, Mank’s release at the height of the pandemic didn’t send historians back in time so much as it sent them into a frenzy. With layers of anachronism and technically refined, if inappropriate, approximations of classic Hollywood, Mank is a history lesson with a hangover, where facts, jokes, myth, and fiction intertwine. The director’s playful biopic of Citizen Kane co-writer Herman “Mank” Mankiewicz (played by the way-too-old Gary Oldman), a writer who didn’t care about credit until he did, is filled with such odd choices and mistakes that one wonders if it’s intentional—as if the perfectionist director abruptly stopped caring. Could the director of Fight Club be messing with us? It doesn’t matter because it proves its point: Even films as great as Citizen Kane aren’t made by one person. Mank himself sums up the film’s historical subservience and subversion through his description of the Marion Davies avatar (a pitch-perfect Amanda Seyfried) in his script for American: Mank is Hollywood history “as people who don’t know [it] imagine [it] to be.” Whatever Mank is or isn’t, it certainly leaves an impression, which is all we can hope for.

Fincher’s exorcising many demons with his latest, The Killer, a sure-to-be misunderstood revenge thriller that recalls the Kurt Cobain line, “Teenage angst has paid off well, now I’m bored and old.” Reframing the archetype most heavily associated with the director, Michael Fassbender plays an unnamed Le Samuraï who lives by a strict code, handles business with extreme care, and pretty much fucks up every job he has. Told in six chapters that focus more on the eponymous hitman than the actual story he’s wrapped up in, Fassbender pierces the plot with the tossed-off intensity of a gig-working killer chasing down the client who didn’t give him five stars. This is the first time Fincher has dealt with failure and his own work this explicitly, sliding in nods to Fight Club, Dragon Tattoo, and Benjamin Button that show the director at his most reflective. Fassbender moves like a shadow in this frequently funny and quietly subversive thriller that either closes the book on Fincher’s interest in the genre or presages a new perspective on his relationship with it.

The Game is an easy one to dismiss. On its face, it seems like a standard Michael Douglas thriller, where America’s slimiest symbol for corporate dominance gets his comeuppance—Gordon Gekko’s Christmas Carol by way of Total Recall. Fincher’s capitalist fable is as austere as it comes, inspiring the look of modern wealth on Succession and eschewing the pitch-black righteousness of Seven for a less aggressive thriller with a killer hook. The titular game here is on Douglas, whose character Nicholas Van Orton appears to have been dropped into several Michael Douglas movies. It’s a Hitchcockian wrong-man story and self-parody, with Douglas milking his persona for all its worth in a speed run through erotic noir, romantic adventures, and financial espionage. Fincher plays tight defense against the viewer’s attempts to get ahead of this thing as the director reminds us that what we see isn’t real, only to destabilize us with a clown doll or a spilled glass of wine and have us wrapped up in the suspense all over again. It’s a masterful genre exercise on par with the director’s best.

Fincher’s breakout dares the viewer to keep watching, taking us from one murky crime scene to the next and luring us toward his final surprise, a near-subliminal and unconventional downer, even by noir standards. Bathed in darkness penetrated only by flashlights and expiring lightbulbs, hinting at an intentionally cluttered production that traps the viewer in detail and suspense, Seven’s weeklong stay in the world’s worst city tells the story of two cops, one a rookie and the other retiring, hunting a killer on a painstaking murder spree based on the biblical seven deadly sins. Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and Mills (Brad Pitt) might as well be tiptoeing around the edge of hell and cliche, but Andrew Kevin Walker’s propulsive script is filled with surprises. Fincher plays with our emotions like John Doe, directing and misdirecting our attention, delivering a heartfelt and heartbreaking buddy cop movie at the center of a vicious and brutal thriller. Credit to the director: Seven’s putrid settings, lived-in performances, and extreme misery do much more than the film’s actual violence. Fincher’s most extraordinary talent might be for how much he lets sit in the viewer’s brain. After all, the torment of these two doomed detectives is far more torturous.

More than a decade after Fight Club, Fincher returned to the well of entitled young men with The Social Network, a zeitgeist-smashing work that gave both Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin some of the highest marks of their careers. A game of he-said-he-said between Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and the three “friends” (Andrew Garfield and Armie Hammer²) about who really invented Facebook, Fincher constructs a rollicking tale of industry, taking audiences from the Harvard dorms to the top of Silicon Valley. Here’s another story of men who have everything except the capacity for compassion, pushing away their friends in hopes of proving a point about how much more elite they are. It’s a digital dick-measuring contest that resulted in tearing the fabric of society apart less than a decade after the movie’s release. What’s remarkable about The Social Network is how perfectly Sorkin and Fincher complement each other, creating something that’s very much a product of its time but still reveals hard realities about our lives online. On any given day, The Social Network could be our number one.

Like Fight Club, Gone Girl plays like a rancorous incel fever dream, a screed against women by men who don’t have real problems. It even plays on Fight Club’s rom-com spine, imagining a conclusion similar to His Girl Friday, a contentious pair doomed to a life making each other miserable. But Fincher’s learned a lot since 1999. His and author/screenwriter Gillian Flynn’s expansive satire of suburban marriage and the media’s obsession with missing white women is as playful as it is scathing. Once again, the director’s exacting staging is at home amid the leisurely life of a trust fund children’s book inspiration (a legendary Rosamund Pike) and the dolt trapped in a life he (Ben Affleck) always wanted. No wonder she’s so resentful. Consistently ignored until she’s suddenly gone, Amazing Amy creates and explodes a new archetype, the mythic “Cool Girl,” a Bogey-woman for the MRA age. As if to show how ridiculous these stereotypes are, each part of Amy’s plan is played for laughs as Fincher and Flynn escalate her masterstroke into absurdity. It’s Fincher at his funniest and most cynical but also his most pointed.

Unceremoniously dumped in the ides of March, Zodiac, David Fincher’s painstakingly realized true-crime masterpiece, stalked past audiences, critics, and awards voters in 2007. The prescient film leans into Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), the true-crime obsessive at the center of the movie and a precursor for the true-crime obsessives that would soon take over the culture. Based on actual case notes and the real Graysmith’s bestseller, Zodiac tethers itself to truth unlike any of Fincher’s other history projects. The director masters then-nascent digital technology to recreate ’70s San Francisco, utilizing impossible camera movements that show the maturity and restraint he lacked in Panic Room, tracking taxi cabs around hairpin turns, and allowing the blood of a fresh wound to seep through the fabric of a victim’s shirt. Led by Graysmith, Paul Avery (played by Robert Downey, Jr., on the come-up) and Dirty Harry-inspiration Dave Toschi (an animal cracker-starved Mark Ruffalo), Fincher’s primaries play off a murderers’ row of character actors under the unflattering fluorescent lights of meticulously recreated newspaper bullpens and police evidence lockers. They toss barbs and crucial information as the movie alternates between All The President’s Men and The Taking Of Pelham One, Two, Three, capturing the energy of a Watergate-era conspiracy thriller. Fincher marries suspense and realism, character beats, and irony so successfully that Zodiac isn’t just the best movie of Fincher’s career, it stands toe-to-toe with the best of all time.