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This article was originally published in 2019 and has been updated to include The Killer, which is now in limited theatrical release ahead of its Netflix premiere on November 10.
\n\nThe last line of David Fincher\u2019s\u00a0Seven\u00a0doubles a mantra for his career: \u201cErnest Hemingway once wrote, \u2018The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.\u2019 I agree with the second part.\u201d That line, uttered by Morgan Freeman\u2019s world-weary detective, offers the tiniest sliver of hope in a film thoroughly engulfed by darkness.\u00a0Seven\u00a0is a rain-drenched neo-noir that doesn\u2019t merely revel in sin and grotesquerie, but directly confronts the question of whether the world is fit to occupy. Fincher\u2019s conclusion is remarkably bleak \u2014 not only are the detectives powerless to stop a serial killer, they\u2019re folded into his cruel machinations \u2014 but he admires the fight, on both sides, to bring order to a fucked-up world. His films are full of visionaries: some of them heroes, some of them sociopaths, none of them passive.
\n\nThey\u2019re also planners. In Fincher\u2019s universe, it\u2019s not enough for people to take bold action against the chaos and discord that surrounds them, but they also have to be detail-oriented. By all\u00a0accounts\u00a0\u2014 and by all evidence onscreen \u2014 that\u2019s his approach to film direction, too: He knows exactly what he wants and he\u2019ll shoot 100 takes until he gets it right. His best films are about that particular pathology, about obsessive personalities who get lost in puzzles (sometimes of their own making) and isolate themselves from the rest of humanity. It\u2019s a common clich\u00e9 in serial-killer movies for detectives to\u00a0think\u00a0like serial killers in order to catch them, but that\u2019s the role Fincher is most comfortable playing. His patterns are deliberate, his methodology cooly precise. He\u2019s also self-aware enough to offer true insight into this behavior.
\n\nAfter cutting his teeth on commercials and music videos \u2014 his work with Madonna (\u201cVogue,\u201d \u201cExpress Yourself,\u201d \u201cOh Father,\u201d \u201cBad Girl\u201d) got him particular attention \u2014 Fincher quickly established himself as an enfant terrible\u00a0on the set of\u00a0Alien 3, a shoot so famously contentious that\u00a0Premiere magazine ran a detailed, on-the-record article on the fiasco the month the film came out. It takes a certain confidence for a first-time, 27-year-old director to insist on his vision and burns bridges if it\u2019s not respected, but from his next effort onward, there was never any doubt that a David Fincher film was fully and unmistakably his own. Ranking his work isn\u2019t about finding the least-flawed vision, but the best-laid plans.
\n\n\n \n \n 12.
\n Alien 3 (1992)\n \n\n
\n\n \nIt didn\u2019t take that\u00a0Premiere\u00a0article to understand\u00a0Alien 3\u00a0as conceptual mishmash of the first order. All the evidence is right there onscreen. The producers burned through several prominent screenplays and directors, but remnants of earlier drafts make the finished script seem like\u00a0a game of exquisite corpse, a nonsensical collision of story elements. The idea of monks on a wooden planet was modified for a religious cult on a prison planet, but\u00a0Alien 3\u00a0was nonetheless caught in a no-man\u2019s-land between the first two films, splitting the difference between a minimalist horror film about fighting a single alien without weapons and a maximalist action film full of corporate schemes and runaway machismo. Yet there are flashes of brilliance in isolated setpieces, like an alien\u2019s-eye view of a chase through the prison tunnels, and it\u2019s by far the bleakest entry in the series \u2014 which is saying something, since\u00a0everyone\u00a0on the\u00a0Nostromo\u00a0but Ripley gets killed in the first one. Fincher\u2019s willingness to lay waste to the franchise in order to revive it would pay off later.
\n\n\n \n \n 11.
\n The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)\n \n\n
\n\n In a bid to make the next\u00a0Forrest Gump\u00a0\u2014 a decades-spanning drama of cultural import and CGI wizardry, penned by the same screenwriter, Eric Roth \u2014 Fincher drifted into the sort of cornball sentimentality that seemed antithetical to his more clinical nature. There are plenty of directors who\u2019d be tacky enough to use Hurricane Katrina as a deathbed framing device, for example, but for Fincher, it\u2019s distinctly out of character. Yet\u00a0The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, loosely inspired by an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, still has moments of breathtaking beauty, tied to the inherently bittersweet notion of a man who ages in reverse. As on-again, off-again lovers who intersect in age only once before passing like ships in the night, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett are a touching pair, and there\u2019s something heartbreaking about a full life ending in infancy, with a man cradled off to eternal sleep. But Fincher\u2019s interest in technology ultimately gets the best of him: This is a journey into the uncanny valley.
\n\n\n \n \n 10.
\n The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)\n \n\n
\n\n For Fincher to direct\u00a0The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo\u00a0was more inevitability than inspiration given the Fincherian honeytrap of Stieg Larsson\u2019s hit novel, which allowed him to return to the serial-killer subgenre for a third time, reheating a decades-old cold case in fiction as he did with the fact-based\u00a0Zodiac. Though it plays now like yesterday\u2019s beach reading, Larsson\u2019s tangled story gets straightened out nicely in the Finch-o-matic, which slathers the requisite gloom on the Scandinavian wilds and ekes a cohesive theme out of an environment hostile to free-thinking young women. As a disgraced journalist hired by a business magnate (Christopher Plummer) to look into his grand-niece\u2019s mysterious disappearance 40 years later, Daniel Craig falls down a rabbit hole that\u2019s swallowed many a Fincher character. But it\u2019s Rooney Mara\u2019s performance as Lisbeth Salander, a freelance investigator and hacker under state guardianship, that gives the film its one true distinction. Though Fincher revels too much in Lisbeth\u2019s exploitation \u2014 the rape-revenge subplot in Larsson\u2019s book is primed for maximum impact \u2014 he and Mara heighten her personal stake in seeking justice. The denouement, too, gives her a particularly lonely place in the gallery of Fincher heroes, who always absorb a private cost for their obsession.
\n\n\n \n \n 9.
\n Mank (2020)\n \n\n
\n\n As the story about the writing of Citizen Kane, Fincher\u2019s portrait of Kane scribe Herman J. Mankiewicz, written by his late father Jack Fincher, is disappointingly facile, from the synthetic sheen of its black-and-white photography (complete with fake cigarette burns) to its winking references to famous moments from the film. But Fincher\u2019s tendency to lose himself in minutiae pays off in a rich evocation of Hollywood in the mid-\u201930s to early \u201940s, where iron-fisted studio heads like Louis B. Mayer would conspire with media titans like William Randolph Hearst to bend the political landscape to their will. Mank lurches around fitfully as a biopic, partly because the elements that seem digressive, like Upton Sinclair\u2019s failed gubernatorial campaign, are also the ones that are most important.
\n\n\n \n \n 8.
\n The Killer (2023)\n \n\n
\n\n \n\n Fincher\u2019s chilly perfectionism has long been a feature of his work, but now it\u2019s the subject of this fussy deconstruction of the hit-man thriller, which recalls Drive or The Counselor in threading pages of philosophical disquisition through bursts of ultraviolence. Throughout most of The Killer, Michael Fassbender\u2019s unnamed assassin carries himself quietly through various deadly encounters. But his internal monologue runs nonstop through voice-over, when he goes into detail about his professional tenets and a lot of spare thoughts and minutiae, which Fincher and his Seven screenwriter, Andrew Kevin Walker, turn into dark comedy. The dime-store simplicity of the plot \u2014 a job goes wrong and our hit man has to knock off the people who come to \u201cclean up\u201d his mistake \u2014 gives The Killer a pleasing and occasionally unsettling minimalism without clutter (if also a little devoid of color). It may not be Fincher\u2019s best film, but it\u2019s certainly his most pure one.
\n\n\n \n \n 7.
\n Panic Room (2002)\n \n\n
\n\n Panic Room\u00a0may be little more than an exercise in style, but oh what style! Working from a script by David Koepp, the genre specialist behind\u00a0Jurassic Park\u00a0and\u00a0Mission: Impossible, Fincher takes the bare-bones premise of a mother (Jodie Foster) and daughter (Kristen Stewart) squaring off against a trio of dangerous home invaders and lets it rip, dashing around every inch of a just-purchased, sparsely appointed, four-story Manhattan brownstone. There are some crucial nuances built into Koepp\u2019s script, like the moral division among the thieves and the complications of the panic room itself, which suffocates the women as much as it protects them. But the chief pleasure of\u00a0Panic Room\u00a0is the compact thrill of Fincher wringing every last drop of suspense from this premise, which finds him moving the camera vertically nearly as often as horizontally across this immense space. It may not have the thematic significance of his best work, but thrillers this impeccably crafted are rare.
\n\n\n \n \n 6.
\n The Game (1997)\n \n\n
\n\n It\u2019s tempting to dismiss\u00a0The Game \u2014\u00a0about an emotionally detached businessman (Michael Douglas) who goes through an elaborate, custom-designed adventure that may or may not be a diabolical plot against him \u2014 as high-concept gimmickry, a far-fetched and frivolous thriller. Yet the film is a fascinating hybrid, like\u00a0A Christmas Carol\u00a0by way of\u00a0The Parallax View: It takes the form of a paranoid thriller, thick with corporate conspiracy, but the action has the effect of shaking its hero from his stupor and bridging the distance his money has afforded him to disconnect from the rest of humanity. The climactic twist may stretch credulity close to the breaking point, but there\u2019s a outpouring of feeling, too, that\u2019s unusual for Fincher, like the payoff to the world\u2019s most expensive therapy session. It\u2019s also funny as hell to watch Douglas\u2019s blue blood get put through the wringer, from the absurdly extensive daylong testing session (\u201cI sometimes hurt small animals, true or false?\u201d) to a literal dumpster dive that costs him a $2,000 pair of shoes. And that\u2019s to say nothing of the graduate-thesis-sized bill that comes at the end of the night.
\n\n\n \n \n 5.
\n Fight Club (1999)\n \n\n
\n\n \nAdapted from Chuck Palahniuk\u2019s short novel about young men finding an outlet for their inchoate anger and frustration,\u00a0Fight Club\u00a0will be a rich text for cultural anthropologists of the future, who might wonder why privileged white guys were feeling so aggrieved at the turn of the millennium (and beyond). The film has become an inadvertent touchstone for disaffected Gen-Xers, but it\u2019s also remarkably perceptive about what happens when bruised masculinity manifests itself in violent rebellion. The movie\u2019s first half is like a two-fisted\u00a0Office Space, perfectly articulating the soul-withering drudgery of a white-collar office drone who longs to break free of his ready-to-assemble, Ikea-box lifestyle. The anarchy that breaks out in the second is harder to track, but Fincher remains plugged in to the potent fantasy of razing the system and hoping something new will rise from the ashes.
\n\n\n \n \n 4.
\n Gone Girl (2014)\n \n\n
\n\n \n\n After\u00a0The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, it fell to Fincher once again to adapt the literary phenomenon of the moment, in this case Gillian Flynn\u2019s delectably batshit thriller about a woman\u2019s disappearance and the cracks it reveals in her marriage. This is Fincher\u2019s idea of a love story, much more so than gauzy convention of\u00a0The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and within this public game of cat and mouse between husband (Ben Affleck) and wife (Rosamund Pike), the film finds a perverse sort of equilibrium. It helps, too, that Fincher is a master of the twist: From page to screen, the big revelations from Flynn\u2019s book could have easily sunk into \u201coh, come on now\u201d territory, but Fincher plants them elegantly within the flow of the narrative, which weaves through different time periods to tell the complete story of a wounded relationship. He squares his particular sensibility with the lurid social commentary of Flynn\u2019s book, carving out a pop provocation that entered the culture like a shiv.
\n\n\n \n \n 3.
\n The Social Network (2010)\n \n\n
\n\n \n\n In the eight years since\u00a0The Social Network\u00a0was released, the diminished public image of Silicon Valley, epitomized by the fake news and data breaches of Facebook in particular, has only further validated\u00a0Fincher\u2019s portrait of founder Mark Zuckerberg as a bloodless creature of ambition. Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin understand Facebook as coded by Zuckerberg\u2019s DNA, in essence the social network of a sociopath \u2014 wholly reflective of his ambition, arrogance, neediness, and petty disregard for other people. Sorkin\u2019s hypercaffeinated voice tends to overwhelm less assertive filmmakers, but his dialogue has never found a more suitable vessel than Zuckerberg, and Fincher counterbalances all the talkiness with moments of pure cinema. The unsettling ambience of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross\u2019s Oscar-winning score sets the surprisingly portentous tone, and Jesse Eisenberg\u2019s performance is blessedly free of ingratiation \u2014 he doesn\u2019t care if the audience likes him, because Zuckerberg doesn\u2019t seem to care, either. The sequence where Zuckerberg slaps together Facemash in a fit of juvenile brilliance from his Harvard dormitory is a thrilling synthesis of campus life and one man\u2019s half-inspired/half-pathetic effort to bottle it in pixels.\u00a0The Social Network\u00a0respects his vision and hustle, but keenly recognizes the flaws that are now readily apparent.
\n\n\n \n \n 2.
\n Seven (1995)\n \n\n
\n\n \n\n After the false start of\u00a0Alien 3, Fincher set the table for his entire career with his next project, a serial-killer thriller that\u2019s so unrelentingly grim and unsettling that it\u2019s a small miracle mainstream audiences went along with it. The premise is pure hokum, with two detectives following the trial of a serial murderer inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins, but Fincher takes it seriously enough to develop deeper themes about sin and evil and whether the world itself can be redeemed. Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt play off each other nicely as a measured, seen-it-all detective and his new brash, emotional young partner, and Gwyneth Paltrow is affecting as Pitt\u2019s lonely wife, who reluctantly supports his transfer to a more dangerous beat. The final \u201csin\u201d is a gut punch that Fincher times out for maximum impact, and the conclusion he reaches is bleak and uncompromising while simultaneously full of genuine feeling for the lonely, dedicated humans beating back the darkness.
\n\n\n \n \n 1.
\n Zodiac (2007)\n \n\n
\n\n \nFincher\u2019s best film also feels the most like a window into his mind, an obsessive movie about obsessives. Opening with a series of murders by the Zodiac killer, who haunted the San Francisco Bay Area in the late \u201960s and early \u201970s, Fincher vividly captures the uneasy tenor of a city that was held captive by a psychopath\u2019s cryptic threats and deadly actions. But that\u2019s only the beginning of a case that would go cold for everyone but the men who devote every spare minute of their lives to it. Played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., and Mark Ruffalo in performances of steady deterioration, they follow every bread crumb through dead-ends and red herrings, so transfixed by the process that they don\u2019t realize the extent to which it\u2019s ruined them. It\u2019s these men \u2014 the evidence collectors, the archive trollers, the puzzle solvers \u2014 that are aligned most closely with Fincher, keeping up their pursuit for the Zodiac as much to scratch an intellectual itch as to find justice for his victims. In fact, the film itself is a gripping reinvestigation of sorts, with Fincher validating and dismissing theories on the near-unsolvable case, and, as ever, fussing over every detail that goes into the hunt.
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