Panic Room (2002)

This thriller opens on Jodie Foster's Meg Altman inspecting a big empty shell of a NY brownstone which she promptly buys and discovers has a panic room just in time for three thieves to break in, and from there, this big empty shell of a movie with a neat concept boxed up deep inside becomes a long stalemate with Meg and her daughter inside the panic room, the thieves at a loss outside, and no amount of tricksy camera work sweeping in and out of keyholes, through walls or meaninglessly zooming in on torch bulbs and gas pipes can raise the tension to anything close to panic-levels given the whole situation is a mess no-one is in control of.

★★☆☆☆

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The Social Network (2010)

Today's movie-making machine churns out documentaries long before a controversy is over; movie-versions come out even before books drop off the bestseller list; celebrity biopics precede celebrity deaths; and, in the case of The Social Network, a current event is committed to celluloid history long before it can truly be called history, but against all odds and despite the prematurity of the story, director David Fincher turns his movie depicting the birth of social networking site Facebook into a rivetting drama - a zippy, talky story of three lawsuits that functions as a character study of an apparently deeply unlikeable young Mark Zuckerberg.

★★★★☆

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Alien 3 (1992)

The gunmetal-blue quiet of space that marked the first two Alien movies is switched for the brown bluster of a prisoner-run refinery in this third movie directed by David Fincher and that change is the movie's fundamental flaw - rather than an unseen, unfathomable, latent horror suddenly, noisily bursting out of space's deep dark and quiet, here the alien burns around Thunderdome at breakneck speed, noisy, more lit up and visible and more understood than ever before, and it is killing not mercenaries or astronaut scientists but a noisy, repellent bunch of grubby convicts that it is hard to care about.

★★☆☆☆

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Zodiac (2007)

David Fincher gives the real-life Son of Sam killings the Bong Joon-Ho Memories of Murder treatment, creating an intriguing police procedural about a cartoonist whose life becomes consumed by the investigation that spanned parts of the 60s, the 70s and 80s but remains unsolved today.

★★★★☆

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Gone Girl (2014)

Gillian Flynn's screenplay based on her keep-you-guessing Ira Levin-esque book is brought faithfully to the big screen by director David Fincher; it's an elaborate thriller and melodramatic portrait of a dysfunctional relationship, mainly of interest because of its gleefully twisted endnote.

★★★☆☆

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The Game (1997)

Don't give up on David Fincher's paranoid thriller in its long, seemingly directionless middle stretch - it ultimately delivers a surprising emotional punch telling the story of Nicholas van Orton, a reclusive millionaire whose fortunes turn when his wayward brother, Conrad, turns up on Nicholas' 48th birthday with a present: a mysterious "game" run by the sinister CRS Corporation.

★★★★☆

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