Fincher returns to the airport novel, and this time he’s up to the task of elevating it beyond even his customary craftsmanship. Some credit to Gillian Flynn’s adaptation of her own book, which can’t quite reproduce the breathless page-turning qualities of the source material but allows room for it to grow into a pitch-black satire of gender-war dynamics. He (Ben Affleck) is the underachieving bozo trying to warm himself with a fading golden-boy aura; she (Rosamund Pike) is the overachieving manipulator fed up with her own “cool girl” posturing. Naturally, he’s blamed for her sudden disappearance and possible murder. It’s a testament to the staying power of Fincher’s film that the rug-pulling twist doesn’t hit quite the same as it does on the page (how could it?), but the ending feels even more pointedly satisfying.
4. Fight Club (1999)
20th Century Fox/Everett Collection
From the pre-millennial get-go, Fight Club wasn’t going to end in a consensus victory. Upon its initial release, it was variously condemned for its nihilistic violence and beloved for its irreverent expressions of Gen-X cultural (especially/specifically male) malaise, less the men beating the ever-loving shit out of each other (though there is that) than the superficial commercialism they’re rebelling against. As we entered the 2000s, it became clear that maybe being really into the IKEA catalog perhaps wasn’t the most pressing global issue, making Fight Club look like simply the most loudly outspoken of the many 1999 movies where white men turn against their middle-class corporate comforts without ever really risking anything (American Beauty; Office Space). Not to mention all of Those Guys who mistook Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden for the coolest guy in the universe, a mistake perhaps more understandable than the Travis Bickle Problem, but also in favor of a less fascinating character.
But then with greater attention paid to incels, Redditors, and other dude-culture malcontents, those missable satirical aspects of Fight Club—the fact that our hapless unnamed Narrator (Edward Norton) is ultimately right to fight against the increasingly fascist instincts of Tyler, which is to say himself—started to seem more prescient than ever. So basically, over the course of a quarter-century, Fight Club has been hilarious, harrowing, smug, sensitive, hateful, smart, regressive, prescient, fascist, antifa, misogynist, and clever. (How’s that working out for you, being clever?) It’s an unusual situation for Fincher, whose fussy penchant for building or recreating worlds often removes his films from this level of discourse. (He’s also not really known for comedy, which Fight Club at least partially is!) Can’t wait to see what happens to it next.
3. The Killer (2023)
Netflix/Everett Collection
