The Game (1997)

David Fincher’s red-herring thriller “The Game” failed with most mainstream critics. I loved it. I just saw a different movie. “Game” is a deceitful movie about the deceit of movie-making, the Hollywood button-pushing that we know is fiction, but that we get sucked up into: Drama, action, comedy. The edits, camera angles, lights, sound effects: We know it’s fake, but we buy in bulk. We get involved. The plot: Michael Douglas is soul-dead San Fran multimillionaire Nicholas Van Orton who accepts a “gift” from his baby brother (Sean Penn), a vacation that comes to him at home and office, a personalized attack that crushes and removes every instinct Nic has built, bought, and forged, starting with a TV with its own mind and running past a crashed cab in deep water. The plot is preposterous, of course, but it’s on purposefully so, this beautiful nasty meta-film of a film stars a man who has bought into his own Hollywood thriller by choice, we the audience running with him. By choice. Douglas -– the symbol of amoral America during the 1980s –– is perfectly cast as a vastly unlikable man who we root for quickly. We are him. A

The Social Network (2010)

“The Social Network” opens with a jaw-dropper slashing. Words are the weapons. Harvard nerd Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) disses his Boston U. girlfriend (Rooney Mara): You ain’t as smart as me. She dishes back lines that could make James Ellroy faint. This is the start of an instant-classic movie from director David Fincher (“Se7en”) about the founding of Facebook. But only in part. It's really about the current Internet generation -– billionaires so young they can barely purchase a bottle of Jameson. Money? Boring. Six jets and a Manhattan pad? Dull. Oprah's couch is Mecca. These guys just want to be liked, in all senses of the word. The brilliant thou-shall-judge plot, of course, concerns whether Zuckerberg created or stole Facebook, and his one friend (Andrew Garfield) screwed in the process. Twenty years from now, after Facebook is gone, cinema fans still will point to this as the greatest autopsy of our fame-is-good era. This is almost 1975 “Network”-level good, and satirically funny. Eisenberg has never been better or colder, more desperate. Aaron Sorkin (“A Few Good Men”) penned the brain-candy screenplay. A

Zodiac (2007)

During the audio commentary of “Zodiac,” James Ellroy declares this stellar David Fincher film “one of the greatest American crime films ever made.” True. It’s also one of the best films about American journalism and obsession, he kind that cracks one’s life like broken crystal. During the 1970s in San Francisco, the self-named Zodiac killed at random, rambled in cryptic letters to the “Chronicle,” ruled radio and TV, disappeared for years. He owned the information, and therefore the city, and one shudders at what he could have done with the Internet. Among the lives he ruined: The detectives (Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards) and newspapermen (Robert Downey Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal) who picked up the pieces and stored the evidence. Fincher and writer James Vanderbilt give us a suspect (John Carroll Lynch of “Fargo”) who presents a veiled sense of evil, but manages to stay outside the spotlight. “Zodiac” is wildly accurate, from the newsroom cigarette smoke to the endless interviews and dead-ends that keep detectives busy. Fincher’s masterpiece. A

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" certainly is a stunner, for the most part. Taking the outline of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, the film follows Benjamin Button, a New Orleans native born into a body the size of an infant but with the health and appearance of an 80-year-old who then ages backwards as he grows older.

It's a tragedy, for sure, as Benjamin's body shrinks to that of a toddler's, but his mind is attacked by dementia. If you can't accept that scenario upfront, the film won't work for you. If you go with it, you'll enjoy this quite good, long, deep drama, directed by David Fincher ("Fight Club" and "Zodiac") and written by Eric Roth ("Forrest Gump" and "The Insider").

Brad Pitt plays the title character, abandoned at birth, raised by an African-American woman in a home for the elderly and who eventually sets off on a career as steamboat worker. Along the way Benjamin falls in love with Daisy (Cate Blanchett), who will age as any other person. With its immediate promise of doomed love and certain tragedy, Fincher could have made a film soaked in sentimentality, but for the most part it remains upright. Well, there are two out-of-nowhere scenes involving a dumb hummingbird visiting the two leads some 60s years and thousands of miles apart that smacks of feathers in "Gump" and butterflies in the piece of poop that is "Patch Adams." Alas, as Benjamin chooses a career in boating, goes to war, stumbles into great wealth and longs for a promiscuous dreamer who disappears for long stretches of time, the film echoes "Gump" in several ways. (I never read Fitzgerald's story. For all I know "Gump" may have stolen from this.)

The pluses outweigh the negatives, though. Through flawless makeup and digital altering, Pitt and Blanchett appear on screen in ages ranging from their teens to their early 80s. Button is not a good-two shoes naive like Tom Hanks' Gump, he happily sleeps around, as does Blanchett's Daisy. And both characters take turns committing acts of selfishness. In Button's case, one act is nearly unforgivable despite its common sense. With those marks of true human nature, it's a deeper film than "Gump." Despite its crazy twist, its flaws and those of its characters, "Button" is a winner. B+