Almost There: Andrew Garfield in "The Social Network"

by Cláudio Alves

Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher are back on Oscar's radar. Sorkin's sophomore directorial effort, Trial of the Chicago 7, is set to premiere on Netflix later this week while Fincher's movie about the making of Citizen Kane, Mank, is scheduled for a December release, also on Netflix. Looking back at the last time both these men were in the awards conversation brings us to 2010 when The Social Network was the critics' favorite going into Oscar night. The drama about the creation of Facebook was the David that fought against the Goliath of Weinstein's The Kings Speech. Unlike the biblical tale, however, the giant won this battle.

The signs of trouble and pending defeat were obvious for most pundits. After all, despite the film getting eight nominations, one of its stand-out performers and expected honorees failed to make the cut. Andrew Garfield had earned great support from the precursors and reviews to match, making his absence from the Best Supporting Actor lineup a shocking snub…

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Horror Actressing: Gwyneth Paltrow in "Se7en"

by Jason Adams

The glimmers of hope that shine through the dank squalor of David Fincher's serial-killer masterpiece Se7en, which is turning 25 today, are so few and far between that we find ourselves clinging to them like life-rafts bobbing down a turbulent sewage drain. One of the library's security guards says, "We got culture coming out of our ass," and then they do, as the gentle strings of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Air Suite No. 3 In D Major" fill the golden-hued dungeon where Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) does his dark research. Similarly Brad Pitt's Detective Mills finds some peace at home playing with his beautiful lively puppies, all locked into a small room lined with newspapers where the dogs do their own important business. Happiness looks like it smells bad!

This nameless city is torrential rain and moldy wallpaper most of the time -- when it's not simply carved-up bodies rising to the surface -- and so Gwyneth Paltrow, ever-chic and resolutely blonde as sunshine, she stands out the first second we see her, coming as she does nuzzled up against Brad Pitt's wall of themselves golden abs. Now this, this right here...

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Acting "Fight Club"

by Cláudio Alves

Fight Club is an exhausting film. Years of heated discourse and malicious fandom have made it so, its miscalculations laid bare by the legacy it has earned. Inheriting the pulp narrative of Chuck Palahniuk's source novel, the movie is a failed satire, critique made incoherent by cinematic idioms where the visceral appeal of style is at odds with necessary intellectual remove. The love many feel for it is still easy to understand, whether it's masked by irony or proudly defended. David Fincher's bravura filmmaking makes toxicity seem cool, kinetic and self-aware. Though, Fight Club seduces too well and, in the end, is unable to bat away its lovers with some feeble pretension of dissected masculinity.

If 4chan had a cinematic embodiment, here it is, as gloriously enraged as it is putrid and entitled, shallowness dressed in a costume of depth. Quite frankly, it's even exhausting to write about the thing. Maybe because so much has been written already. After so much discussion of its theme, intent and Mephistophelean stylings, I propose we discuss an element of the picture that's rarely examined – the art of acting Fight Club…

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Retcon this, link

• Vulture are Spider-Man Far From Home and Call Me By Your Name the same film? (hilarious read)
• IndieWire upsetting account of turmoil behind the scenes of Big Little Lies season 2 as Andrea Arnold's vision was thrown aside during post-production. Well, we knew it didn't feel like an Arnold production so here's why
• Hard Drive "J.K. Rowling reveals that you, the reader, were gay all along" (this is a few months old but I LOL'ed so much I had to share icymi) 

more after the jump including Mindhunter, Disney's global dominance, Jack Reynor and Gus Kenworthy...

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Soundtracking: "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"

by Chris Feil

Folks seem to be greeting this week’s “Dragon Tattoo story” The Girl in the Spider’s Web with “that again” eyerolls, like something we’ve moved on from. But David Fincher’s American kickoff birthed its own now tired pop culture artifact when it revamped Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” to christen its grungy tale of abused women and lurking fascism. The band had once been largely cagey about use of their music for repurposing, even signature tracks such as this, but now you can easily find it at play in superhero movies and commercials.

None of them however touch the singularity of Fincher’s grim vision as he used it in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo...

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