David Fincher directs Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter in the modern masterpiece rejecting consumerism, soft masculinity and sanity.

No matter how many times you watch it, this pitch black comedy can become a bit of an achy blur. Fincher just directs the fuck out of it using digital effects confidently to take us out of a fear receptor through an Ikea catalogue into a chemical burn fever dream and leave us in our pants with our brains spilling out of our cheeks. And being pummelled in the face like that with so much quality cutting edge filmmaking, anarchic humour and gleeful misanthropic destruction can leave even the keenest viewer only remembering the final twisty blow and not all the colourful, vivid bruises and scars earned throughout. Norton and Pitt have a lovely chemistry making you wish they would reunite on a project with similar vision and ambition. A massive “go fuck yourself” to corporate led studio filmmaking (Three Kings, Being John Malkovich… what was in the Hollywood water coolers in 1999?) that set everyone involved up on a pedestal you’d need a long hard reach to knock them down off of to this day.

10