David Fincher is arguably one of the most talked-about filmmakers of the past 20 years, so it’s admittedly kind of weird to list his body of work and realize that he’s only made 12 films, one of which was an Alien sequel. Another thing that stands out is the fact that there are no absolute stinkers on the list – on a scale of 1 to 10, I wouldn’t rate any movie he’s ever made lower than a 6. The man does good work, is the point, and we all know the ultimate reward for creating quality art is for someone on the internet to arbitrarily rank that art according to an undefinable metric of personal taste.

That’s right, folks. Being the hero that I am, I decided to rewatch every film in David Fincher’s catalog and rank them from worst (“worst” being an extreme term in this case) to best. It was no small task – nearly all of his films are over two hours long, with a few damn near hitting the three-hour mark, and his work rewards audiences who pay close attention to details over multiple viewings. So while these rankings are by no means definitive, they are 100% correct, because they are mine.

12 Alien 3

Sigourney Weaver as Ripley and a Xenomorph in 'Alien 3'
Image via 20th Century Studios

Fincher’s debut feature is also one of his most controversial films. Alien 3 went through a handful of permutations and rewrites, including one script famously written by science fiction legend William Gibson. The version that finally made its way into Fincher’s lap threw series heroine Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) onto a prison colony with a bunch of born-again convicts, killing off her entire supporting cast from the previous film in the first few seconds. Alien 3 disappointed many fans of the franchise, but it’s not an ineffective horror movie – the visual style is unmistakably Fincher, with feverish lighting and ominous shadows providing the backdrop for some of the most grisly violence of the series. It takes the haunted house approach of Ridley Scott’s original Alien and applies it to what is essentially a cathedral, using the idea of infection and the yellowish color palette to create a plague film about a monstrous alien parasite. Unfortunately, it faced several production difficulties, and Fincher didn’t yet possess the reputation to support his notorious perfectionist habit of shooting endless takes. He refuses to participate in any retrospective interviews or commentaries about the film, and seems content to forget he ever directed it.

Alien 3 Film Poster
Alien 3
R
Action
Horror
Sci-Fi

Returning from LV-426, Ellen Ripley crash-lands on the maximum-security prison Fiorina 161, where she discovers that she has unwittingly brought along an unwelcome visitor.

Release Date
May 22, 1992
Director
David Fincher
Cast
Sigourney Weaver , Charles S. Dutton , Charles Dance , Paul McGann , Brian Glover , Ralph Brown
Runtime
114 minutes

Watch on Hulu

11 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Brad Pitt in 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'
Image via Paramount Pictures

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button begins with a ten-minute story about a magnificently ornate clock that runs backward, which sums up the whole film pretty well. It’s an artfully constructed epic about a man who ages in reverse, and while it’s very nice to look at, ultimately the only purpose of watching it is to see time go by. There’s not much of a story in Benjamin Button; it’s a chronicle of a man’s whole life, and all of the relationships he forms along the way. It’s like Forrest Gump with a different gimmick, and while it’s not ineffective on an emotional level, I can never quite figure out what the point of it is. The film seemingly makes an interesting philosophical observation about there being little difference between extremely old and extreme young age beyond your physical appearance, but Jerry Seinfeld made the same observation years ago, and he took way less time to do it. Like all of Fincher's films, it’s extremely watchable, and every frame is meticulous and compelling. But ultimately, Benjamin Button is about a woman who falls in love with a weird genetic mutant and gets punished for it her entire life. It's... weird, man. Taraji P. Henson is great in it, though.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button poster
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
PG-13
Drama
Documentary
Fantasy
Mystery
Romance
Thriller

Tells the story of Benjamin Button, a man who starts aging backwards with consequences.

Release Date
December 25, 2008
Director
David Fincher
Cast
Cate Blanchett , Julia Ormond , Faune A. Chambers , Elias Koteas , Donna DuPlantier , Jacob Tolano
Runtime
167

Rent on Prime

10 The Game

Michael Douglas with a gun in David Fincher's The Game (1997)
Image via PolyGram Films

Fincher’s 1997 film about a mysterious organization that subjects you to the worst LARPing experience of your entire life is a movie I routinely forget exists, but not because it’s bad. It’s a well-crafted thriller featuring Michael Douglas as a modern-day Scrooge being tossed through the ringer, and nobody does simmering yuppie rage quite like him. However, The Game is only really effective as a thriller the first time you watch it. I realize that can kind of be said about any thriller, but the statement is uniquely true for this movie – once you know the ending, the tension evaporates and the plot of the movie becomes impossible. Fincher has said that the many plot holes and logic leaps are intentional, and that his purpose was to make a meta-thriller about how thrillers themselves are constructed. But I gotta say, without spoiling too much, it’s really difficult for The Game to hold your attention on a second viewing. It's absolutely wild that first time, though.

Watch on Tubi

9 Mank

Gary Oldman walking in Mank
Image via Netflix

Mank, David Fincher’s 11th film is also a movie in which Charles Dance does an American accent and fucking dares anyone to say anything about it. The story follows chaotic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) as he pounds out the screenplay for what will become Citizen Kane while convalescing after a car accident that left half his body in a cast. The movie jumps around in time, juxtaposing Mank’s furious bouts of writing with the story of him meeting actress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) while working for MGM in the 1930s and striking up a friendship with her and her lover, infamous newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (Dance). Anyone who took a film class or has a reasonable interest in Hollywood history probably knows that Citizen Kane wound up being a rather pointed takedown of Hearst, and Fincher uses the dual storylines to explain the forces that drove Mank to resent his onetime friend and craft a scathing dramatic rebuke that ultimately winds up being an indictment of himself as well.

Mank is a surprisingly light film, considering both Fincher and the subject matter, and it’s an extremely fun watch for anyone with even a mild curiosity about old-timey Hollywood. The dialogue is quick and sharp, the performances are pitch-perfect, and Mank himself is an extremely likeable character, even if he is a bumbling drunk most of the time. Fincher’s film avoids the pitfalls of most “movies about movies” by not really being about the making of Citizen Kane at all – it’s about the reasons why Mank unconsciously decided to write it in the first place. Fincher works that notion of unconscious drive into the narrative, as the motivations behind the screenplay don’t become completely clear to either Mank or the audience until the final act. For all the grandness of its material, Mank is a remarkably quiet story, about a man coming to terms with his life and his work. It’s an excellent piece of craftmanship (the sound design alone, mimicking the tinny audio tracks of films of the era, is a simple yet remarkable achievement), and it’s a pleasant watch, but it won’t stick with you the way Fincher’s more visceral dramas imbed themselves in your brain.

Watch on Netflix

8 The Killer

Michael Fassbender as The Killer sitting on the floor looking ahead in The Killer
Image via Netflix

Michael Fassbender’s unnamed killer in the aptly titled The Killer might be the closest Fincher has ever come to putting a character like himself into one of his movies. Both are hired guns (this marks Fincher’s second film with Netflix, not to mention several TV projects) who are perfectionists at their craft, taking their time to make sure everything is right before making their move. But it’s also been a while since Fincher has made a film this restrained, this small scale, and this intense, as we follow the aforementioned killer dealing with the fallouts of a mistake made on the job. Fassbender is excellent and intense in the title role, and Fincher is brilliant at getting us inside the killer’s head, as he slowly starts to let emotion take over his usual calm and collected approach. The Killer is impeccably crafted (would we expect anything less from Fincher?), in everything from the way the killer evolves over the course of the week, to the remarkable detail in sound design that will leave the audience cringing. The Killer is a lean, captivating thriller for process nerds that gives us one of Fassbender’s best performances. — Ross Bonaime

The Killer poster
The Killer (2023)
R
Action
Adventure
Crime

After a fateful near-miss, an assassin battles his employers, and himself, on an international manhunt he insists isn't personal.

Release Date
November 10, 2023
Director
David Fincher
Cast
Michael Fassbender , Tilda Swinton , Charles Parnell , Monique Ganderton
Runtime
118 minutes

7 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Rooney Mara in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Image via 20th Century Studios

Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is one of the only experiences I’ve had in a theater in which I felt so uncomfortable I looked around at the rest of the audience to make sure I wasn’t in some kind of sting. A mystery thriller based on the international bestseller, the movie is entrenched in brutal sexual violence, and while much of it occurs offscreen, the stuff we’re forced to sit through is more than enough to profoundly ruin the rest of your day. That said, Rooney Mara gives a memorable performance as the feral genius Lisbeth Salander, who gets recruited by journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) to help him investigate the cold case disappearance of a wealthy businessman’s grand-niece. Set primarily on a stark snowbound estate in Sweden, the film’s visuals are striking and oppressive, echoing the impenetrable layer of secrets blanketing the Vanger family. However, apart from Fincher’s directorial eye and Mara’s captivating performance, the mystery itself is kind of dull; it becomes obvious who the killer is almost immediately, and the ultimate solution to the girl’s disappearance is deeply unsatisfying and lands with a near-audible thud. Strangely, even though the novel was the first installment of a trilogy, neither Fincher, Mara, or Craig returned to make a sequel, and the rest of the series has yet to be adapted in America.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo poster
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
R
Crime
Documentary
Drama
Mystery
Thriller

Journalist Mikael Blomkvist is aided in his search for a woman who has been missing for 40 years by young computer hacker Lisbeth Salander.

Release Date
December 14, 2011
Director
David Fincher
Runtime
160

Rent on Prime

6 Panic Room

Once you’ve stopped laughing at Jared Leto’s ridiculous hair, Panic Room becomes an engaging if somewhat clunkily written thriller. Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart play Meg and Sarah, a mother and daughter forced to barricade themselves in the titular panic room after three criminals stage a home invasion. It’s a unique cat-and-mouse story that turns the genre on its head – the villains know exactly where the protagonists are, and the protagonists can see everything the villains are doing thanks to the safe room’s security cameras. Instead, the tension comes from wondering just how long Meg can keep this up. The film deals with the illusion of control and safety – the panic room immediately becomes a prison rather than a fortress the instant Meg locks herself and her daughter inside. Sure, the bad guys can’t get inside, and she can monitor the entire house, but she has no way of signaling for help and no way to escape her captors. The story relies on a few overused tropes – Sarah has diabetes seemingly because the screenwriters couldn’t think of any other reason why Meg would ever even consider opening the door, and Burnham (Forest Whitaker) is the reluctant thief with a heart of gold who provides more than one deus ex machina moment. But thanks to Fincher’s precise direction and some engaging performances, including a real barn burner of a villain in Dwight Yoakam, Panic Room rises above the weaknesses of its script to be an entertaining thriller.

Panic Room poster
Panic Room
R
Crime
Documentary
Thriller

A divorced woman and her diabetic daughter take refuge in their newly-purchased house's safe room when three men break-in, searching for a missing fortune.

Release Date
March 29, 2002
Director
David Fincher
Runtime
112

Rent on Prime

5 Fight Club

Brad Pitt and Edward Norton in a still from 'Fight Club'

The movie that became the misinterpreted rallying cry of a generation of douchebags, 1999’s Fight Club is a bizarre comedy dressed up as a psychological thriller. The film’s anti-capitalist soundbytes tend to overshadow its main theme of escaping the comfortable prisons middle-class white people construct for themselves, and ironically made for great t-shirts. But the chaotic nihilism swirling through the movie is just so goddamn entertaining that even its more eye-rollingly grandiose statements of purpose seem punk rock and edgy. Brad Pitt’s impish performance as ultimate edgelord shit-stirrer Tyler Durden is genuinely hilarious, and he’s so compulsively watchable that I can sit through the scene in which he turns his sculpted abs and impossibly handsome face to the camera to tell us that none of us will ever be models without batting an eye. Fight Club is David Fincher’s version of slapstick, and while it’s a little too long and its twist can be seen coming a mile away, it has an infectiously ghoulish energy that’s a ton of fun to watch.

fight-club-poster
Fight Club
R

An insomniac office worker and a devil-may-care soap maker form an underground fight club that evolves into much more.

Release Date
October 15, 1999
Director
David Fincher
Cast
Edward Norton , Brad Pitt , Helena Bonham Carter , Meat Loaf , Zach Grenier , Richmond Arquette
Runtime
139
Main Genre
Drama

Rent on Prime

4 Gone Girl

Gone Girl Amy laying down Cropped

Based on Gillian Flynn’s controversial bestseller, Gone Girl is a unique thriller that shifts gears into a completely different kind of beast midway through. Ben Affleck stars as Nick Dunne, a man who may or may not have been involved in the disappearance and possible murder of his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike). Nick does very little to advocate for his own innocence, and as the mystery deepens, it becomes more and more likely that he was directly involved in a terrible crime. Then we reach the midpoint, and Gone Girl abruptly turns into an entirely different kind of suspense thriller, more along the lines of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Gaslight. Like virtually all of Fincher’s films, it’s an extremely watchable experience, loaded with interesting performances including Pike’s Oscar-nominated role as the missing Amy. It’s a film about perspective and how it can be manipulated, similar to 1997’s The Game but less of a magic trick and more of a character study. It’s also about gender roles and dynamics within a marriage, and how our subconscious acceptance of those definitions can alter that perspective and cloud our judgment without us even realizing it. It’s a fascinating film, and one that I feel gets frequently overlooked when discussing Fincher’s filmography.

Gone Girl poster
Gone Girl
R
Drama
Mystery
Thriller

With his wife's disappearance having become the focus of an intense media circus, a man sees the spotlight turned on him when it's suspected that he may not be innocent.

Release Date
October 3, 2014
Director
David Fincher
Runtime
149 minutes

Watch on Max

3 The Social Network

The Social Network’ (2010)   (1)

The Social Network begins with one of the most exhausting scenes of Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue I have ever encountered, which perfectly sets the stage for the rest of the movie. Jessie Eisenberg plays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as he goblins his way through the creation of the social media giant, swindling and cheating and generally being a massive asshole to absolutely everyone he comes into contact with. This includes his co-founder and business partner Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), literally the only actual friend he has. For most of its two-hour runtime, The Social Network is surprisingly light and subdued, and genuinely funny in several scenes; Armie Hammer is hilarious as the stuffily flustered Winklevoss twins, two guys so buffoonish in their shared superiority complex that they can’t quite reconcile being duped. But Fincher strikes a raw nerve with Zuckerberg’s gradual manipulation of Eduardo, batting it around for most of the movie until finally ripping it out with the gut-busting climax in which Zuckerberg finally hits his partner with one of the biggest screw jobs in history. If you didn’t want to punch Mark Zuckerberg before, you’ll be dying to do so after watching The Social Network.

The Social Network poster
The Social Network
PG-13
Biography
Documentary
Drama

As Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg creates the social networking site that would become known as Facebook, he is sued by the twins who claimed he stole their idea and by the co-founder who was later squeezed out of the business.

Release Date
October 1, 2010
Director
David Fincher
Cast
Jesse Eisenberg , Rooney Mara , Bryan Barter , Dustin Fitzsimons , Armie Hammer , Joseph Mazzello
Runtime
120

Watch on Netflix

2 Zodiac

zodiac-robert-downey-jr-jake-gyllenhaal-social
Image via Paramount Pictures

Fincher’s sprawling true crime epic about the infamous serial killer who taunted police and the media with cryptic letters containing bizarre coded messages about his identity and his future victims is part mystery, part historical drama, part comedy, and part horror movie. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Robert Graysmith, a newspaper cartoonist who becomes obsessed with deciphering the Zodiac’s code and ends up becoming one of the chief investigators of the case. Robert Downey, Jr. plays his coworker Paul Avery, and Mark Ruffalo portrays police inspector Dave Toschi. In other words, the cast slaps. And the movie itself is utterly captivating as it follows the three men across a decade and a half of dead ends, red herrings, near misses, and shocking developments in their pursuit of the murderer. Based on the book of the same name by the real-life Graysmith, Zodiac doesn’t come to a definite conclusion, as the case itself was never solved. But Fincher takes us through every triumph and frustration the investigators experienced, the chilling recollections of the surviving victims, and the panic that gripped San Francisco during the 60s and 70s with passionate authenticity. (He and the writer and producers did extensive research of their own, including interviewing witnesses and victims and consulting with Graysmith and Toschi). Zodiac is not only one of Fincher’s best films, but also one of the best true crime films ever made.

Zodiac
R
Crime
Drama
Mystery
Thriller

Between 1968 and 1983, a San Francisco cartoonist becomes an amateur detective obsessed with tracking down the Zodiac Killer, an unidentified individual who terrorizes Northern California with a killing spree.

Release Date
March 2, 2007
Director
David Fincher
Cast
Jake Gyllenhaal , Mark Ruffalo , Anthony Edwards , Robert Downey Jr. , Brian Cox , John Carroll Lynch
Runtime
157 minutes

Rent on Prime

1 Se7en

Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman in Se7en (1995)
Image via New Line Cinema

1995’s Se7en might be the greatest mystery thriller ever made. Starring Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt as two detectives in a race to track down a fanatical murderer staging his killings around the seven deadly sins, the movie is tense and frightening, building at a relentless pace until punching you in the heart with its unforgettable finale. Fincher’s direction is laser-focused; we learn everything we need to know about the two main characters through their interactions with each other, without wasting precious screen time on establishing their backstories. Their only significance is the role they play in the mystery, a technique Fincher would reuse in 2007’s Zodiac. The violence in Se7en is grisly and horrifying, but always experienced secondhand – like the two detectives, we never witness any of the murders. We only see the aftermath, and have to piece together what happened as best we can. Freeman and Pitt search for clues in an anonymous city plagued by torrential rainfall and looming shadows, with almost no natural light until the climax, which appropriately takes place in broad, shadowless daylight. It’s a lean suspense yarn with a darkly satisfying conclusion, and is one of the most memorable thrillers I have ever seen. If we were deciding which David Fincher movie to put on the gold record to be shot out into space for alien civilizations to preserve for all eternity, Se7en gets my vote, hands down.

se7en-movie-poster
Se7en
R
Crime
Mystery
Thriller
Drama

Two detectives, a rookie and a veteran, hunt a serial killer who uses the seven deadly sins as his motives.

Release Date
September 22, 1995
Director
David Fincher
Cast
Brad Pitt , Morgan Freeman , gwyneth paltrow , R. Lee Ermey , Daniel Zacapa
Runtime
127 minutes

Rent on Prime