13. David Fincher
DAVID FINCHER
THE SOCIAL NETWORK, FIGHT CLUB, SEVEN, ZODIAC
After making a string of urgent, graphic looks into the seedy underbelly of American complacency (Seven, The Game, Fight Club, and Panic Room), David Fincher reemerged in 2007 a fully-developed auteur. With the surprisingly patient procedural Zodiac, Fincher declared that he wasn’t playing games anymore. No twists, no contrivances – just testing the limits of obsession and enterprise, themes he’d revisit three years later with his most acclaimed film, The Social Network. Between the two, he turned out The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a picture funded as Oscar bait that focused not on the great change one man could enact, but rather man’s mortality from a philosophical outlook at once existentialist and transcendentalist. Not bad for a guy whose work was once called “irresponsible and appalling.”
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