10 David Fincher Movies That Are Pretty Much Perfect

David Fincher is among a handful of filmmakers whose every new project is met with widespread excitement and intrigue. In a career spanning just over 30 years, David Fincher has cemented his status as one of Hollywood’s leading filmmakers. His attention to detail may be storied and highly discussed, but it is this attention to every aspect of filmmaking that has endeared David Fincher to fellow professionals and audiences alike. His association with a project now carries an implicit expectation of high quality.

During his Hollywood career, Fincher has directed 12 feature films, often involving serial killers and psychopaths. However, despite handling such dark source material, David Fincher has consistently produced entertaining, cerebral, and often crowd-pleasing films. Thanks to trusted recurring collaborators, his keen eye for detail and his unique directing style, Fincher’s films have consistently reached a high watermark, producing some of the best films in recent memory. Despite his claims that he is never searching for “perfection”, these 10 Fincher films are pretty much perfect.

10 ‘Panic Room’ (2002)

Written by David Koepp

David Fincher’s 2002 home invasion thriller is perhaps his most accessible and commercial film. Panic Room starred Jodie Foster and a young Kristen Stewart as a mother and daughter duo whose new home is invaded by burglars. A box office success, Panic Room has, over the years, become one of Fincher’s most underrated films.

Panic Room showed early signs of Fincher’s ability to elevate what could easily be deemed as schlocky material. In different hands, Panic Room could have been a standard, run-of-the-mill movie but Fincher’s direction infuses the premise with a genuine sense of dread. Fincher’s innovative filmmaking techniques help to put the audience in the shoes of Jodie Foster’s Meg Altman. The character’s claustrophobia, helplessness and fear of the burglars are all efficiently communicated. In addition to Foster and Stewart, Fincher also extracted excellent performances from Forest Whittaker, Jared Leto and Dwight Yoakam, who played the three very different burglars. An excellent thriller, Panic Room nervously recreates the fear of being trapped in your own home while carrying audiences along on an exhilarating cinematic experience.

9 ‘The Killer’ (2023)

Written by Andrew Kevin Walker

In 2023’s The Killer, Michael Fassbender plays an obsessive, regimented, control-freak assassin. He is not afraid to spend hours following his routine, he believes there is one way to do the job properly and he isn’t worried about what he’ll need to undergo to achieve it. For a director whose films are littered with his surrogates, Michael Fassbender’s The Killer is by far and away the closest David Fincher comes to creating a self-portrait.

When The Killer’s mission goes wrong, he is forced to improvise (breaking one of his rules), which starts a cycle of hunting down those coming for him while trying to protect those closest to him. The Killer is a decidedly stripped-down version of similar serial killer films. This approach lets the film focus squarely on The Killer’s character and psyche. Like several of Fincher’s films, The Killer greatly benefits from successive rewatches. With each rewatch, The Killer’s hypocrisy and lies become clearer, as do Fincher’s motivations in telling the story.

8 ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ (2008)

Written by Eric Roth

Taking a detour from psychopaths and criminals, David Fincher and Brad Pitt marked their third collaboration by making arguably Fincher’s most transparently sentimental film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The Best Picture-nominated film, which was based on a 1922 F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, tells the story of Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), a man who ages in reverse.

Fincher swapped his serial killers and detectives for a decades-spanning love story between Pitt’s Benjamin Button and Cate Blanchett‘s Daisy and an examination of some of life’s biggest questions. Made only a couple of years after the passing of his father, Fincher’s raw emotionality and contemplation of the nature of life and death can be seen all over the film. Benjamin Button is a man sentenced to death the moment he was born but instead chose to live his life to the fullest. In addition to a Best Picture nomination, the film also received Academy Award nominations for Brad Pitt, Taraji P. Henson and provided Fincher with his first nomination.

7 ‘Mank’ (2020)

Written by Jack Fincher

In Mank, Fincher turned his focus on genius and obsession onto an often underappreciated pioneer of American cinema, Herman J. Mankiewicz. For his first film for Netflix, Fincher used his credit with the streamer to produce his late father’s screenplay about the co-writer of one of the most influential American films; Citizen Kane. The authorship of the trailblazing film has always been in contention and in this film, Fincher dissects the psyche of an alcoholic, obsessive genius who may have been at Citizen Kane‘s center.

Mank is a great character study about a man whose genius is begrudgingly noticed but never appreciated and whose self-destructing tendencies threaten to ruin any chance of a lasting legacy. By highlighting some of Herman’s contemporaries and rivals, Fincher uses Mank to depict the history of old Hollywood and the creation of what would become today’s Hollywood. Like Citizen Kane, Mank examines the media and wealthy figures’ role in society, art and politics. Its critique of William Randolph Hearst (and similarly, Citizen Kane‘s critique of Charles Foster Kane) remains valid in the present day.

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6 ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ (2011)

Written by Steven Zaillian

Fincher’s adaptation of Steig Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novel and the first English-language adaptation was a thrilling, intense serial killer thriller. While Fincher’s direction and familiarity with the genre once again elevate what could have been a dour trudge, the film firmly rests on Rooney Mara‘s excellent, Academy-Award-nominated, performance as Lisbeth Salander.

Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara make a great, albeit unexpected, detective pairing unraveling a decades-old mystery. As is customary for Fincher, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoodoes not run away from the novel’s darker and more gruesome themes. In addition to its central serial killings, the film touches on themes of sexual assault and torture.

5 ‘Fight Club’ (1999)

Written by Jim Uhls

David Fincher’s Fight Club has become one of the most misunderstood films in the years since its release. However, despite its many misguided interpretations, Fight Club remains a biting social satire on the disillusionment of young men, the search for charismatic leaders and the often infantile solutions these leaders come up with.

Led by stellar performances from Brad Pitt – whose Tyler Durden embodies the film’s ‘all style, no substance’ ethos – Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter, the film asks several provocative questions and in the vein of great art, never prescribes mandatory solutions. It is a film that has grown in critical estimation while simultaneously being adopted by the very subset of people it warned against.

4 ‘Gone Girl’ (2014)

Written by Gillian Flynn

In David Fincher’s Gone Girl, which Gillian Flynn adapted from her novel of the same name, audiences are kept on their toes through unexpected story twists and an ever-changing hero point of view. Gone Girl is an extremely well-acted, pulpy and entertaining cat-and-mouse thriller.

Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck lead the cast as a married couple, Nick and Amy Dunne. Amy’s surprise disappearance on their wedding anniversary kick-starts an entertaining, twisty thriller that involves ex-boyfriends, blackmail and Nick becoming the prime suspect for her suspected murder. With Gone Girl, Fincher and Gillian Flynn challenged the audience’s expectations of certain character types and the idealized perception of the American suburban couple. In addition, the film also analyzed the media’s role in the sensationalization of true-crime stories, the many sides of the criminal justice system and the evolution of interpersonal dynamics in a romantic relationship. For her chilling, calculating and precise performance, Rosamund Pike received her first Academy Award nomination.

3 ‘Zodiac’ (2007)

Written by James Vanderbilt

With 2007’s Zodiac, David Fincher returned to the crime procedural genre that he had expertly executed 12 years earlier. Zodiac painstakingly detailed the police investigation, press coverage and hunt for the Zodiac Killer in the 1960s and 1970s. A childhood fascination for Fincher, he made sure to address the serial killer and his crimes with the appropriate levels of intrigue and respect for the victims. Zodiac efficiently depicts the dedication and intensity needed to investigate such a harrowing series of crimes.

Fincher also uses the film to return to his themes of obsession and personal sacrifice. Zodiac is just as interested in the hunt for the serial killer as it is in what this hunt does to its three leads’ professional and personal lives. Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), is the cartoonist turned reporter whose books would eventually serve as the basis for the film. Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) is the lead investigator on the case and Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) is a crime reporter who received direct threats from the killer. Littered with excellent performances, John Carroll Lynch‘s performance as the lead suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, is the standout pick from a great batch.

2 ‘Se7en’ (1995)

Written by Andrew Kevin Walker

Upon its release, David Fincher’s Se7en quickly established itself as a landmark serial killer and police procedural film. The 1995 film starred Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman as two detectives, at different ends of their careers, who were tasked with catching a serial killer targeting his victims based on the seven deadly sins. The film is a dark and uncomfortable examination of human nature, our propensity for evil and the lengths the bad people will go to corrupt the good. The film’s success would lead to several films trying to imitate its formula and while many were successful, Se7en remains the standard-bearer for the genre.

In Fincher’s trademark fashion, he makes a film centered around a pedantic investigation of a nihilistic serial killer thoroughly entertaining. Pitt and Freeman are excellent as the naive and world-weary cops, respectively, and Gwyneth Paltrow shines as the sliver of warmth in the film. In a brilliant decision, the killer’s identity is obscured from the audience until the film’s final stretch. When John Doe (Kevin Spacey) finally makes an appearance, his demeanor, calculations and actions spin the film on its head and put the two lead characters in surprising, unforeseen situations.

1 ‘The Social Network’ (2010)

Written by Aaron Sorkin

Following his success in the genre sandboxes, David Fincher might have seemed an unexpected choice to tell the story about the founding of Facebook. However, working off an Academy-Award-winning script by Aaron Sorkin, Fincher told a scathing story about capitalism, greed, and the pieces of ourselves we lose in search of the billion.

Equal parts ‘great man doing a great thing’ story and courtroom drama, The Social Network depicts its hero – Mark Zuckerberg – as a petty, insecure and damaged man. The film reveals the friendships and relationships he loses in search of what would eventually become one of the landmark innovations of the 21st century. With the rise of social media in our culture, entertainment and politics, the film now comes across as prophetic, foreboding and quaint. As is most often the case, Fincher extracts great performances from his actors. Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield are excellent as best friends turned rivals and the film shines because of the effectiveness of their relationship.