Every David Fincher movie, ranked

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 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.

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, ’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 , 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, 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 , 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, , 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 and , 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.