Every David Fincher Movie, Ranked

David Fincher is sometimes accused of a smug misanthropy, as his obsessive fascination with procedure, behavior, and psychology can suggest an unfeeling smirk or a weary shake of the head at the human condition. Though The Killer does touch on some weighty themes related to death and fate, particularly in a lyrical scene where Michael Fassbender’s character has a showdown with a glamorous, nihilistic fellow assassin (Tilda Swinton), the film’s relatively slight, linear narrative seems to have permitted the director to cease his investigations for a little while. His calculating approach is instead applied in service of a straightforwardly entertaining film, and while it might not offer much in the way of originality or depth, it’s undeniably effective and refreshingly unafraid to embrace its own shallowness. In conjunction with the film’s release, we ranked all of Fincher’s features to date. David Robb

Editor’s Note: This entry was originally published on December 3, 2020.

12. Alien³ (1992)

Alien³ may be the only film to ever peak with its logo. As the 20th Century Fox fanfare crescendos over the studio’s famous logo, the music holds on the minor chord before the last note, replacing jubilant bombast with a dissonant groan of strings. The alteration produces an instant sense of unease, setting the tone for something ominous and fearsome. It’s an ingenious shot across the bow from Fincher, ushering in a feature career dotted with immaculately ordered, carefully scored works of blockbuster entertainment. But that perversion of the Fox theme epitomizes a succinct grasp of horror that only occasionally surfaces in the film. Too often, Alien³ shows its seams, whether in its thematic arc or the design of the xenomorph, and it feels weighed down by unnecessary exposition and padded suspense scenes. Jake Cole

11. Panic Room (2002)

To varying degrees, Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, and Panic Room are all about confrontations between classes in a capitalistic society; the extreme measures necessary to jolt people out of complacency; and the ways in which class distinctions suppress our natural instincts and morality. The most style-forward of these films, Panic Room is a violent ballet between a representative of the upper class (Jodie Foster) and the representatives of the lower classes. There’s a formalist sensibility in Fincher that often shows itself even in small or seemingly unimportant moments. But in Panic Room, his love for objects and abstract composition takes over the film, sacrificing too much of the characterization and narrative drive that have propelled his more successful work. Still, his fluid camerawork, augmented by computer tricks, is wondrous to behold, giving the impression of flowing through anything in the camera’s path, peeking inside to see how objects are assembled and how things are laid out. Ed Howard

10. Gone Girl (2014)

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which so cunningly toys with our expectations of narrative and relationships, clearly appealed to Fincher, whose art has always been devoted to the enigma of personality and memory. But he catalogues the events of the novel with an elegant brusqueness that feels wiped clean of potential resonances. Fincher’s detachment is fitting here only insofar as he’s dealing with characters who are always on guard. But there’s detachment, and then there’s disinterest. Woe is Amy (Rosamund Pike), a practically brick-to-the-head example of Freud’s concept of the uncanny, and woe is Nick (Ben Affleck), the prototypical nebbish who’s unlucky to have gotten caught in her crosshairs. There’s a comic streak to his Gone Girl that suggests Fincher may understand the material as trash, but it’s the kind of affectation that only reinforces, rather than dulls, the film’s insults. Ed Gonzalez

9. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

While Fincher’s perceptible “reimaginings, compressions and reductions” of the novel’s lurid, soap-operatic plot, which is rife with the familiar intrigue of your average mass market paperback, can’t elevate trash to art, they do give one the impression of attending the most handsome funeral procession ever mounted—which is, in the end, better than feeling like you’re the corpse lying inside the coffin. If Lisbeth’s goth armature feels less like a stunt this time around, it’s because Rooney Mara understands it as such, a calculated bit of theater that the character is only committed to in the abstract; it’s a purposeful exaggeration meant to deliberately alienate the world. Of course, that Lisbeth, in the end, is at her most vulnerable when pining for Mikael may flesh her out as a character, but it also confirms that em>Dragon Tattoo, in all its incarnations, is really nothing more than the story of girls running to and from their daddies, and no matter how you dress it up, it’s inherently retrograde. Gonzalez

8. Mank (2020)

Fincher is conscious throughout Mank of the explanatory clichés of the biopic and avoids them. The film abounds in barely articulated cross-associations that suggest a bygone society driven by an infrastructure of unknowable vastness. And the opportunity to conjure such a labyrinthine and increasingly sinister impression of community is what excites Fincher. Mank is a parable on the limits of control, fashioned with rueful self-awareness by one of Hollywood’s most famous contemporary control freaks. Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) must live with an existence, fashioned in part by his own self-loathing and lack of discipline, in which he’s to ineffectually bear witness to the flexing of American corruption as represented by an intersection between the press, Hollywood, and the government. Such a theme also very consciously aligns Mank with the “fallen, not-quite-great man” themes of Citizen Kane. Chuck Bowen

7. The Killer (2023)

The Killer is probably David Fincher’s most lightweight literary adaptation to date. This comparatively barebones action thriller has none of the social commentary or pop psychology that color The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl and their page-turning source material, instead following a titular, unnamed hitman (Michael Fassbender) and his efforts to cover his tracks after a botched contract turns him and his girlfriend (Sophie Charlotte) into the new targets of his paymasters. Though The Killer does touch on some weighty themes related to death and fate, particularly in its most lyrical scene where Fassbender’s character has a snowbound showdown with a glamorous, nihilistic fellow assassin (Tilda Swinton), Fincher largely applies his calculating approach in service of a straightforwardly entertaining film, and while it might not offer much in the way of originality or depth, it’s undeniably effective and refreshingly unafraid to embrace its own shallowness. Robb

6. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

Fincher would seem an unlikely choice to helm The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an era-spanning epic whose sweeping, poignant romance doesn’t seem a natural fit for a digital-era auteur whose films are generally typified by cool, sleek, exacting meticulousness. And yet that measured, distant disposition is, in fact, what prevents his latest from sliding into the mawkishness for which it so often seems destined. As written by Eric Roth, it’s is in many ways a kindred spirit to Forrest Gump, in that its center is an especially unique individual whose life, and unflagging amour for a beauty he can only temporarily be with, plays out against the backdrop of 20th-century America. However, whereas Roth’s prior, Robert Zemeckis-helmed Oscar darling was as mushy as a box of chocolates melted by the midday sun, Fincher’s is a far more reserved portrait of everlasting love, a work whose aspirations for grandeur are, more often than not, mitigated by a controlled aesthetic and emotional rigor that situates the film in a comfortable middle ground between the sentimental and the standoffish. Nick Schager

5. Fight Club (1999)

Fight Club still exhibits its fair share of pre-millennial tensions: As a mindfuck, it boasts a Godzilla-sized act-three twist that’s both thoroughly prepared as well as thematically resonant. As a satirical indictment of a certain cult of machismo, it nevertheless spawned emulators and copycats. (It also contains the risibly disingenuous scene where a flawlessly chiseled Brad Pitt scoffs at media depictions of fashionable masculinity.) As an exemplar of Fincher’s pyrotechnical inclinations, it’s among his most successful meshings of style and substance, with none of the unwarranted showboating found in, say, Panic Room’s CG-enabled zoom into a flashlight. Here, CG effects work to embed characters within a digitally expressionistic background, as in the scene where the nameless narrator (Ed Norton) walks through his apartment, which morphs around him into an itemized, price-tagged IKEA ad. Budd Wilkins

4. The Social Network (2010)

A portrait of the prick as a very young man, The Social Network uploads a fictionalized account of the birth of Facebook and the monumental success it reaped for noxious billionaire co-creator Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg). The film film is concerned with “how we live now,” but it occupies itself less with underlined questions about “the online experience” than with the relationship between the site and its forefather, a Gatsby-lite Harvard undergrad driven by a need for acceptance from the school’s elite, an ego consumed with Big Idea aspirations, and a nagging need to compensate for his personality failings through unbridled ambition. The film speeds along a veritable information superhighway, flying through conversations, scenes, locations, and time frames with an alacrity that evokes modern ADD media interfacing: consume, process, respond, move on! But fleetness doesn’t mean glibness, as Fincher segments and layers his material at a pace befitting the meteoric ascendancy of Facebook itself, and without the grandstanding that’s sometimes marked his work. Schager

3. Se7en (1995)

The anticipation leading up to Fincher’s sophomore effort was stifled by Jon Amiel-directed Copycat. Also recall that Brad Pitt was still fresh from flipping dewdrops from the brim of his hat into the crotches of moviegoers worldwide. It seemed like it was going to be a line drive down the middle, and then we saw the sights (each victim’s demise one-upping the last, peaking, arguably, with sloth), smelled the smells (desperation, sweat, diesel fuel, marinara sauce), and heard the questions (“What’s in the booooox?!”). Beyond its legacy as the film that resuscitated a debased genre, and following fast on the heels of his botched, meddled-with debut (Alien³), Se7en, with its incredible sense of craft and rhythm, announced a major auteur whose work continues to surprise with each new release. Its icky tone and Grand Guignol style helped to feed rumors that Fincher, then an unknown quantity in the movie business, was some kind of cross between a hotshot ad man and a pervert. But subsequent features have helped many to see Se7en, in hindsight, as more than a dazzling and depressing one-off. Jaime Christley

2. The Game (1997)

The tensions between the rich, the middle class that serves them, and those wild forces who subvert both groups have been the bread, butter, and jam for Fincher since Alien³. But The Game remains his most challenging and balanced workout of these conflicts. At its core, the story isn’t completely unlike that of A Christmas Carol, but the ultimate reward here isn’t a newfound respect for Nicholas Van Orton’s (Michael Douglas) fellow man or the unprivileged. Rather, it’s a selfish yet inarguably positive exploration of himself, a secular excoriation of what’s been repressed since his father plummeted to his death. This is a personal, revelatory work for a director who, coincidentally, was dealing with his own feelings of isolationism and misanthropy at the time of its production. And like the masters of the medium, his tremendous power as an artist is in his ability to communicate and make these feelings resonate, perhaps even make them universal, by presenting them as a preposterous game. Chris Cabin

1. Zodiac (2007)

Unlike Se7en, Zodiac is played for exacting realism, with a conclusion that any true-crime buff will know from the outset. Fincher aims for suspense via both traditional thriller means as well as through a comprehensive analysis and recreation of the sprawling investigation into the Zodiac Killer’s random murders during the ’60s and ’70s by San Francisco Chronicle “boy scout” cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) and hard-nosed, soft-spoken inspector David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo). Based upon his own extensive research as well as Graysmith’s two nonfiction books about the case, Zodiac is a police procedural indebted to works like All the President’s Men, much of Sidney Lumet’s canon, and The Wire. Yet as this sprawling opus unfolds, what emerges isn’t simply a routine detective story but something far more masterful, and haunting: a two-and-a-half-hour portrait of obsession run amok, and of the multifaceted influence of the media—and the cinema—on society. Schager