Best David Fincher Movies, Ranked

Summary

• David Fincher’s films showcase Oscar-caliber performances with dark, thrilling narratives.
• Mank explores the making of Citizen Kane with stunning black-and-white cinematography.
• Fincher’s The Killer is a meticulous, arthouse assassin film with a suspenseful finale.

David Fincher is one of the modern cinema greats. His choice of genre, style, tone, and direction clearly defines his movies. He’s done some amazing work with thrillers that venture into incredibly dark places and also give way to memorable characters. All of Fincher’s films elicit spectacular, Oscar-caliber performances from the cast.

He’s known for some of the most iconic mystery and drama films, including the detective thrillers Zodiac and Se7en, but also plenty of book adaptations, like Fight Club, Gone Girl, The Social Network, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Here’s how this masterful director’s filmography compares.

Be sure to also check out Netflix’s Mindhunter series, in which David Fincher serves as the executive producer and showrunner, with several episodes also directed by him. He’s also the executive producer of House of Cards and Love, Death & Robots, and has directed for those shows as well.

12

Mank

David Fincher movies can be an acquired taste, but Mank truly represents the best case of that. It’s directed from a screenplay written by his late father, Jack Fincher, and it chronicles the making of Orson Welles’s 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane, hailed as the best movie of all time. It’s even filmed in black-and-white to fit the 1930s-40s Hollywood aesthetic and won an Oscar for its cinematography.

It’s told from the POV of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman ‘Mank’ Mankiewicz, played by Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman in a committed and honest portrayal, as always. However, if you’re not a diehard fan of Citizen Kane or historical movies about old Hollywood, then you’ll find Mank bland and hard to get into, and it ultimately fails to hold your attention the whole way through.

11

Alien 3: Assembly Cut

Fincher’s first feature, Alien 3, was also not his finest hour but to no fault of his own. The studio made a lot of cuts and didn’t allow his creative freedom to shine in the way he intended, so, therefore, he disowned the theatrical version. Alien 3’s story ultimately wasn’t as strong and the puppetry mixed with CGI for the Xenomorphs was also very rough, a drastic dip in quality from the first two installments.

However, Alien 3 still had its moments and is slightly better with the Assembly Cut. Here, Ripley crash lands onto a planet where the Xenomorphs now invade a prison complex and must work with the inmates to battle the alien threat once more. There are still many iconic scenes, like the Xenomorph getting close to Ripley’s face without harming her and a first-person Xeno corridor chase that Alien: Romulus nodded back to, along with new twists.

10

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first novel by Swedish author Stieg Larsson in his Millenium trilogy. While this kind of complex and disturbing investigative thriller is right up David Fincher’s alley, his American version, starring Rooney Mara in the titular role of Lisbeth Salander and Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist, was not as strong as the 2009 Swedish version starring Noomi Rapace.

While Fincher’s version remains faithful to the story, the pacing felt off from both the book and the Swedish adaptation, with most of the film coming off as rushed and lacking depth, especially if you haven’t read the book for yourself. That’s despite its already long, almost three-hour runtime. Daniel Craig’s portrayal of Blomkvist might also leave you mixed, but Rooney Mara and Stellan Skarsgård are terrific in their parts.

9

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button represents a departure from David Fincher’s typical R-rated thrillers into a sci-fi fantasy period drama more suitable for younger audiences, and it’s also based on a short story by The Great Gatsby author, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The film depicts the strange anomaly of Benjamin Button, a peculiar human who was born as an elderly shriveled-up baby and matures into a younger man.

Brad Pitt plays the titular character aging in reverse, with the movie even winning the Oscar for VFX and makeup for how they brought the character to life. It’s a bizarre and interesting movie, but one also filled with tons of emotion, and that’s only heightened by the excellent supporting cast. The way the period element is brought to life also feels very immersive and surreal.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ties with films like Forrest Gump, Gone with the Wind, LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring, and 2024’s Emilia Pérez for 13 Oscar nominations.

8

The Killer

The Killer could be David Fincher’s most misunderstood work. It’s an arthouse assassin film that really delves into the character of a hired contract killer, based on the French comic book series by Alexis Nolent. It can almost feel like an audiobook diary of Michael Fassbender’s character’s most intimate thoughts and viewpoints, but it’s also written, crafted, and filmed as meticulously as the killer’s methods, which is where its brilliance lies.

The tagline for The Killer reads “Execution is Everything,” and with every crisp shot in this movie, in an almost meta way, David Fincher has achieved just that. The plot moves along well between each chapter, with no sense of where it goes next. After Fassbender’s assassin messes up his hit, it all leads up to a suspenseful finale, and one of the most visceral, brutal, and chaotic fight sequences you wouldn’t come to expect from Fincher.

7

The Game

David Fincher’s The Game is basically about the worst birthday present you can ever imagine gifting to someone, starring Michael Douglas. It’s a tale of paranoia where it feels like your life is being invaded by an actual deadly conspiracy when it was all supposed to be an innocent roleplaying game, and the film’s ending is the icing on the cake for what the main character goes through.

Michael Douglas stars as Nicholas Van Orton, a well-off San Francisco banker facing a tough 48th birthday, given that his father took his own life at that same age. To spice things up, his younger brother Conrad, played by Sean Penn, decides to give him a mysterious gift via Consumer Recreation Services, an immersive entertainment company that will orchestrate a chain of events that have realistically dangerous implications.

6

Gone Girl

Gone Girl was one of the most-talked-about and best-selling mystery-thriller novels, and getting the original author, Gillian Flynn, to also write the screenplay and David Fincher to direct proved magical. This is one of those rare cases where the movie turned out just as solid as the book, with all the twists and turns hitting their intended marks. And if you can believe it, Flynn’s novel is still darker and more disturbing.

Gone Girl offers one of the prime examples of effective unreliable narrators and has some of the most twisted plot developments and visuals in a marriage thriller. It chronicles the fictional case of Amy Elliott Dunne, a wife who goes missing and her unconvincing and disingenuous husband becoming the primary suspect in her disappearance and potential murder. When it all ends, to say the resolution will shock you is an understatement.

5

Panic Room

From the very opening credits sequence, you’ll know that you’re in for a special treat with David Fincher’s Panic Room. It’s a home invasion thriller that feels elevated and different, standing above all others before and after it. The skilled camerawork around the main location of the high-rise Manhattan home is simply on another level, featuring really cool POV shots that pan, wind around, and zoom through various features and surfaces.

The film centers around the plight of a mother and her diabetic daughter surviving three violent intruders by locking themselves in their new home’s built-in panic room, which also happens to be the area these men are trying to access. It’s a suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat thriller as you watch Jodie Foster’s Meg Altman try to outmaneuver them, and features some compelling performances not just by Foster but also by Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, and Dwight Yoakam.

4

Se7en

Se7en is the most iconic film of David Fincher’s career and features one of cinema’s most unforgettable endings. Brad Pitt’s hard-boiled detective finally breaking and crying out “What’s in the box?” is a haunting moment that will forever remain in everybody’s memory. That’s all driven by the cold, demented, and unsettling performance of the serial killer antagonist.

As its cleverly worded title suggests, Se7en follows the story of two homicide detectives, William Somerset and David Mills, on the trail of a serial killer who carries out murders based on the seven deadly sins of Christianity. It’s one of the most disturbing and gruesome fictionalized cases you will get to examine, but that is David Fincher’s specialty.

3

Zodiac

Zodiac is another movie that runs well over the two-and-a-half-hour mark for Fincher, but it’s so immersive, rich with detail, and brings you a ton of commanding performances that you’ll just want to keep watching. It follows the turbulent period in America’s history when the Zodiac Killer was at large, one of the most notorious serial killers whose identity remains unknown and whose murders went unsolved.

Fincher’s direction in this film feels like True Detective before the actual HBO show came into existence. The source material is based on the true-crime books by San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith, who is portrayed in the movie by Jake Gyllenhaal​​​​​​. Then, you also have Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo as the supporting cast involved in the investigation, and it’s truly some of their best dramatic work, period.

2

The Social Network

The Social Network is based on the biographical book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich and depicts the behind-the-scenes drama of Facebook’s founding. It also combines the massive talents of director David Fincher, writer Aaron Sorkin, musical collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and lead actor Jesse Eisenberg, so it’s not a surprise this film was a three-time Oscar winner.

Seeing the troubled history behind everything is eye-opening. Eisenberg embodies Mark Zuckerberg in one of the best efforts of his career, and Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake likewise nail their supporting parts. The film conveys how unethical, cutthroat, and manipulative the tech titan was in getting Facebook to where it is from its early days, painting quite the controversial portrait of Zuckerberg. And Zuckerberg is still seen as a polarizing figure to this day.

1

Fight Club

Whether a huge fan of Fincher or not, Fight Club is a movie almost anyone can come to love. It has one of the biggest and most impactful twists in cinema history and the ending shot is astonishing and memorable, as are the performances by Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. It also has one of the most iconic film quotes of all time, “The first rule of fight club is: You do not talk about fight club.”

Fight Club is based on the novel of the same name by author Chuck Palahniuk, and it’s one of the most recognizable fictional thrillers to put a spotlight on mental health. The main narrator is Edward Norton’s character, who suffers from insomnia and cycles through different support groups for some sense of comfort. One day, he meets Tyler Durden, and the duo creates a secret underground fight club that escalates into a much more serious endeavor.