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Few directors have a penchant for precision, like David Fincher. He is a master of mood, method, and mischief, and there is something inherently hypnotic about his style of cinema. While films like Fight Club, The Social Network, and Se7en have come to define the filmmaker’s legacy and filmography, another side of his work often gets relegated to the B side.

A still from David Fincher’s Se7en | Credits: New Line Cinema

Here, we’re ranking ten of his most underrated projects and discussing why they deserve your attention.

10. Mank (2020)

David Fincher rarely gets credit for his playfulness as much as he does for his precision. Mank is a homage to 1930s and ’40s Hollywood that isn’t a love letter to its Golden Age but a look at its hypocrisies and ambitions.

Gary Oldman (who was nominated for an Academy for his role) stars as Herman J. Mankiewicz,...

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This March, Paramount+ is bringing you a ton of entertainment with the much anticipated true crime drama series Happy Face and also the streaming release of the horror comedy film Rumours. However, for the purposes of this article, we are only including the films that are coming to Paramount+ this month and have a 90% or higher Rotten Tomatoes score. So, check out the 10 best films coming to Paramount+ in March 2025 with a 90% or higher Rotten Tomatoes score.

Up In The Air (March 1) Rotten Tomatoes Score: 90% Credit – Paramount Pictures

Up in the Air is a comedy-drama film directed by Jason Reitman, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Sheldon Turner. Based on the 2001 novel of the same name by Walter Kirn, the 2009 film follows Ryan Bingham, a man whose job is to travel places and fire people from their jobs.

In one of the opening scenes of the award-winning movie There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’ protagonist, Daniel Plainview, stands with his adopted son, little H.W., atop his shoulders, giving the movie’s famous “I’m an oil man” speech. Plainview uses H.W. as a prop to soften his image, describing himself as a family man, running a family business, as he lobbies to win new contracts for lucrative oil leases out West at the dawn of the gusher age.

The movie is loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil,...

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This January, Paramount+ is bringing you a ton of entertainment with the highly anticipated new film in the Star Trek universe alongside a great new series based on Sherlock by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. However, for the purposes of this article, we are only including the films that are coming to Paramount+ this month and have a 90% or higher Rotten Tomatoes score. So, check out the 8 best films coming to Paramount+ in January 2025 with a 90% or higher Rotten Tomatoes score.

Arrival (January 1) Rotten Tomatoes Score: 94% Credit – Paramount Pictures

Arrival is a sci-fi drama film directed by Denis Villeneuve from a screenplay by Eric Heisserer. Based on the 1998 short story titled Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, the 2016 film follows Louise Banks, a linguistic expert tasked with interpreting the language of aliens who have come to Earth in a giant spaceship.

“The Bikeriders” is taking a trip from original to adapted screenplay Oscar consideration.

Focus Features’ drama, directed and written by Jeff Nichols, will compete for the Academy Award in the best adapted screenplay category, Variety has learned exclusively.

The movie stars Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy. It premiered at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival, garnering rave reviews despite the ongoing Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild strikes. Initially scheduled for release by 20th Century Studios on December 1, 2023, the film’s launch was delayed. Focus Features later acquired the project and released it in June. Before this acquisition, Variety exclusively confirmed that although the film draws inspiration from Danny Lyon’s iconic photobook, it was initially positioned as an original screenplay. However, those plans have shifted.

Read: You can see Academy Award predictions in all 23 categories on one page on the Variety Awards Circuit: Oscars.

“The Bikeriders” tells a fictionalized...

The Rise of a Phenomenal Actor Few actors have had as diverse a filmography as the great Paul Dano. From comedic and lighthearted films to dark and emotionally driven roles, his ability as an actor and his performances in these movies are like no other. Alongside acting, Dano is also a director as he made his directorial debut with the 2018 film ‘Wildlife’, which is an adaptation of the Richard Ford novel of the same name and stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan. The talented actor first started out on Broadway at a young age and made his debut on screen for the film, ‘The Newcomers’ in 2000. Since then, Dano has appeared in many notable movies and television series and earned several awards for his performances. Here is a look back at his best roles and the films he has starred in. Things to do: Subscribe to The Hollywood Insider’s YouTube Channel,...

Let’s talk about the pandemic for a moment. No, not the Covid-19 Pandemic. The pandemic that, 100 years ago, killed millions and shuttered the United States for a time: the Great Flu of 1918. The virus infected roughly one-third of the world’s population, claiming the lives of approximately 50 million worldwide. Coup!, written and directed by Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman, utilizes this all-too-familiar setting to build an intriguingly dark class comedy starring Peter Sarsgaard, Billy Magnussen, and Sarah Gadon.

We open on a dead cook, Floyd Monk, and the mysterious man (Sarsgaard) attempting to impersonate him. We’re in the back of a restaurant that’s been shuttered thanks to state-issued safety protocols. The dead man has a gig the impersonator takes on: chef for a rich family quarantining at their estate on an island only accessible by ferry. The patriarch is Jay Horton (Magnussen), a spoiled journalist writing columns...

Some Luchino Visconti grandeur in Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman’s Coup! with Jay Horton (Billy Magnussen) and his wife Julie (Sarah Gadon) In Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman’s fleet-footed Coup! (which had its world premiere at the 2023 Venice Film Festival), shot by Conor Murphy, with costumes by Stacy Jansen (Marc Turtletaub’s Jules) and a score by Nathan Halpern (Chloé Zhao’s The Rider), starring Peter Sarsgaard, Billy Magnussen and Sarah Gadon with Skye P Marshall, Faran Tahir, Kristine Nielsen, Willa Dunn, Callum Vinson, and Fisher Stevens as Upton Sinclair, the Spanish Flu of 1918 turns a well-established world inside out.

We start out by discussing how the global events of 1918 correlate with the present, the mystery of a missing finger left on the cutting room floor, pacifism and vegetarianism. We move on to nods to F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, George Bernard Shaw and Upton Sinclair,...

For a film that opens with a sepia-toned newsreel montage aimed at situating its plot at a precise historical moment, and includes Upton Sinclair (Fisher Stevens) among its cast of characters, Joseph Schuman and Austin Stark’s Coup! feels strangely dislocated from time. Given that the setting is an island off the mid-Atlantic coast during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, this comes off as intentional, if only to a degree. In isolation, as anyone who experienced a Covid lockdown knows, time becomes a strange beast indeed. When we’re cut adrift from the routines of work and social obligation, our sense of historical continuity begins to wink out like a dying fluorescent bulb, and the film’s characters experience the same phenomenon.

Coup! follows an enigmatic rogue, Floyd Monk (Peter Sarsgaard), who passes himself off as a cook in order to gain employment at an island estate a boat ride from New York City.

Quick Links Both There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men Are Adapted From Novels No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood Are Both Considered Westerns No Country for Old Men Largely Overshadowed There Will Be Blood in 2007 There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men were both released in the same year, with one overshadowing the other in popularity. Both movies were also based on books by acclaimed writers. While both are great, it's not uncommon to want to compare both movies even though one deserves more recognition than it's gotten.

2007 was a good year for hit Westerns, with There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men being released nationwide in the U.S. just over a month apart. Both movies had released in film festivals prior to their general release and still hold high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes to...

Food, Inc. 2 follows the golden rule of Hollywood sequels: The second time around, the villain must be scarier and the death count higher. Directors Melissa Robledo and Robert Kenner’s 2008 documentary Food, Inc. helped spark a national conversation about the devastating economic, environmental and health effects of our industrialized food system, and built momentum for serious reform. They never intended to direct a follow-up. But since then, Big Ag has fought back, and by some measures the problems caused by corporate consolidation have only gotten worse.

Journalists Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), who co-narrated the first film, became famous for exposing the deep dysfunction of America’s food industry. They’ve since followed their curiosity to other realms — psychedelics for Pollan, for example, and nuclear warfare for Schlosser. But 16 years after the release of Food Inc., they’ve reteamed with the directors for the sequel,...

“You get me?” barks Career Drill Sergeant Zim (Clancy Brown). The young, beautiful, and vapid recruits giving him their full attention answer in kind: “Sir yes sir!” Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) and his fellow roughnecks might get Zim, but most people do not. Since its first theatrical run through today, viewers misread, misunderstand, and, frankly, misattribute Starship Troopers time and again, failing to see the cutting satire at work.

The most recent example comes from author Isaac Young, who took to Twitter to critique the film’s approach to satire. Young argued that director Paul Verhoeven failed to make fun of the Terran Federation because the attractive heroes, clean cities, and technologically advanced schools look nicer than the ugly bugs they fight.

Why the first Starship Troopers movie failed as a parody, a thread:

Watching the movie, it was clear the director was aiming for a campy, over-the-top depiction of the Terran Federation.

Although Coup! has a small cast and unfolds mostly in a secluded mansion during the 1918 influenza pandemic, it packs a lot of flavor, suspense and droll comedy into its slim 97-minute running time, making it fun enough to deserve an exclamation point in its title. Peter Sarsgaard offers a sly, juicy performance as a shady chef who weasels his way into the home of an entitled young heir (Billy Magnussen). Soon, the upstart is turning the servants and family members against the hypocritical patriarch, who fancies himself a progressive. A collaborative effort between writer-directors Austin Stark (The God Committee, The Runner) and Joseph Schuman, this satirical work is hardly profound or subtle about the parallels with the present-day class conflict, but it wears its screw-the-rich subtext with insouciant breeziness.

In the opening minutes, Sarsgaard’s Floyd Monk is met shaving off his beard and styling his mustache, seemingly to make...

The 1 percent may be enjoying some serious #lifegoals at the minute, but they’ve been having something of a tough time on screen. Parasite, Triangle of Sadness and The Menu are just a few recent films that have shifted the power dynamics away from the super wealthy and into the hands of those grubby lower classes, with sometimes deadly results. Coup! — from Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman, who both wrote and directed, and closing the Venice Days sidebar — is set to join this growing list.

Set during the 1918 Spanish Flu, the darkly comic thriller stars Billy Magnussen as Jay, a progressive, velvet-slippered U.S. journalist sheltering from the chaos with his family — and their servants — on a swanky island estate (all the while penning angry articles that suggest he’s in the thick of it in New York). But when Peter Sarsgaard’s mysterious grifter Floyd shows up as their cook,...

Daniel Day-Lewis is a method actor's method actor. He burrows so deep into his characters he becomes them for a time. When he portrayed Abraham Lincoln, he would text Sally Field, who played Mary Todd Lincoln, in the voice of the Great Emancipator. Given his knockout good looks and palpable screen presence, Day-Lewis could've made a killing as a movie star, but he understood his value as a performer, and carefully called his shots after winning his first Academy Award for Best Actor as artist Christy Brown, who famously created while having cerebral palsy, in Jim Sheridan's "My Left Foot."

Over his 20 credited performances, Day-Lewis has only made two movies that could be considered pure genre efforts: Michael Mann's frontier adventure "The Last of the Mohicans" and Rob Marshall's godawful adaptation of the musical "Nine." But even these are deep-tissue immersions. Day-Lewis has resisted the temptation to be Day-Lewis.

A passion project from Director Alberto Arellano, Mental Soirée invites our imaginations to run wild, scintillates our taste buds and beckons viewers to enter into a universe where telepathy is not only possible but can be quantifiably studied using three simple steps. Blurring the line between storytelling, poetry and experimentation, Arellano’s outlandish thought experiment asks audiences to dine at a buffet of concepts and take away whatever they want. The film’s fantastical FX, achieved on set through the use of high speed cinematography rather than with CGI, are also a sight to behold and bring life to a story told through colours, shapes and symbols. We sat down with Arellano to talk about using the tutorial format to blur the line between reality and fiction, the sumptuous food styling which added to the atmosphere of the universe he so delicately built and the weaving together of a music...

Stephen King has written any number of perceptive and bone-chilling stories about moral strength, innocence lost, and the psychic battle that has raged between good and evil since the beginning of time. His 2020 novella “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” — an anti-tech fable about a teenage boy who befriends a reclusive billionaire, buys the old man an iPhone, slips the device into his casket when he dies for some reason, and then starts receiving ominous text messages from the same number after the funeral — is definitely not one of them. Such bottom-drawer source material proves to be an insurmountable disadvantage for John Lee Hancock’s Netflix adaptation of the same name, a downcast and .

The first problem is that “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” doesn’t even begin to broach that idea until it’s already too late, as the majority of Hancock’s moribund script is spent on an awkward cross between “Tuesdays with Morrie...

Surprise: these are quality movies on an important subject. Entry 13 in the ‘Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture’ gives us not sleaze but two well-produced vintage public education epics on the subject of (gasp) venereal disease. Although reissued by sensation hucksters as racy ‘forbidden’ fare, they had serious social aims — the screenplay for one was adapted by the famed author Upton Sinclair. The other was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. Added extras are four short subjects directed by Edgar G., and two sex-ed lecture reels that alternate between funny and revolting.

Damaged Lives & Damaged Goods

Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture, Volume 13

Blu-ray

Kino Classics / Something Weird

1933 & 1937 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / Street Date February 8, 2022 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, Phil Goldstone

Kino’s ongoing series ‘The Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture’ has creeped through every vintage sensation that could be 4-walled, carnival style,...

Miami — The strobes are pulsing. The fog machines are pumping. Three professional dancers wearing haute-couture costumes that appear to be made of newsprint contort themselves on stage to the all-encompassing roar of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance. Their dance partners, dressed in blue windbreakers and FBI caps, run their hands lasciviously up these mainstream-media sirens. Behind them, on an enormous screen, graphics emerge through war-zone CGI smoke: the New York Times logo, followed by a “vs.,” followed by: “Veritas. Be Brave. Do Something.”

For once, no one can dispute the...

As timely as last night’s episode of “ESPN Sports Center,” and as riveting as a well-crafted tick-tock suspenser, “National Champions” adroitly avoids most of the pitfalls common to conventional “message movies” by raising and debating issues in the context of a solid and involving drama that can be enjoyed even by people who couldn’t tell an offside kick from a cheerleader’s cartwheel. It’s intent on exposing the inner workings of college football, but don’t expect a lot of gridiron action here. Except for a few — very few — highlight clips sprinkled here and there, the focus remains on the interactions of players, coaches, media scrums, well-heeled boosters, freelance fixers, and NCAA movers and shakers during the countdown to the fictional Snickers College Football Championship.

Three days before the big event in New Orleans, a national title clash pitting the undefeated Wolves against the 13-1 Cougars, Heisman...

Highest ranking script by a woman is Bridesmaids at number 12.

Writers Guild Of America (WGA) has anointed Jordan Peele’s Get Out the best screenplay of its top 101 of the 21st century so far in a list that contains no female writers in the top 10.

Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay for Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind based on a story by Kaufman, Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth came second, while Aaron Sorkin’s script for The Social Network based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires ranked third.

Rounding out the top five are Parasite by Bong Joon Ho...

Peacock has ordered a new series hosted by world-famous science educator Bill Nye, Variety has learned exclusively.

Each episode of the show, titled “The End is Nye,” dives into the myths and realities of both natural and unnatural threats, from viruses to volcanoes, asteroids to authoritarianism, and climate change to chemical warfare. The show offers a scientific blueprint for surviving, mitigating, and preventing such catastrophes from occurring.

Brannon Braga will serve as showrunner and executive producer on “The End Is Nye” in addition to directing all episodes. Nye will also executive produce in addition to hosting. Seth MacFarlane and Erica Huggins of Fuzzy Door Productions will executive produce. Rachel Hargreaves-Heald is executive in charge of production for Fuzzy Door. The series is a co-production between Universal Television Alternative Studio UCP. Fuzzy Door currently has an overall deal with NBCUniversal.

Nye first rose to fame in the 1990s as the host...

There are a lot of reasons to like “Mank.” 1. It’s great filmmaking. 2. It has an irresistible backstory: David Fincher wanted to pay tribute to his late father, Jack, by directing his screenplay; 3. It tackles a well-known topic (Hollywood in the 1930s-‘40s) from an unusual angle. 4. It’s not what people expected, always a good thing in a film.

It’s not about the making of the 1941 classic. “I hope this movie exists as more than just an addendum or footnote to ‘Citizen Kane,’ ” Fincher tells Variety. “I hope there is enough human behavior and an interesting enough look at humanity that it doesn’t require a master’s degree in film theory.”

Among other things, it is a character study of Herman J. Mankiewicz, including his risky decision to write “Citizen Kane.” It’s also about the times he lived in, and how events fed into his creativity.

When David Fincher sat down with Netflix executives in the spring of 2019, he did not expect to be handed the equivalent of a blank check. Sure, the 58-year-old filmmaker — a former music-video wunderkind best known for pushing the envelope with baroque serial-killer thrillers (Seven), toxic-masculinity satires (Fight Club) and social-media origin stories (The Social Network) — was a name-brand director, and had helped kick off the golden age of streaming with the outlet’s first original series, House of Cards. But Fincher was used to resistance. You can’t have this budget.

This holiday season, one of the few bright spots for families unable to go to theaters—and even those who did—was Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984. An ambitious and vibrantly colored celebration of heroism in all its forms, including those that don’t end in fistfights, it’s a superhero movie that’s won as many fans as detractors. But while basking in the new spectacle is well and good, it’s also worth considering how it came to be. For even in this HBO Max tentpole, one can still see how the feminist movement of the early 20th century is grafted into the very DNA of the Wonder Woman character, her origin, and even her most contentious iconography… something that rarely gets acknowledged in the broader comic fan community.

The character of Wonder Woman was created by Dr. William Moulton Marston in 1941. A psychologist with an eclectic career, Marston...

If your grandfather wrote “Citizen Kane,” you could imagine that might be a helluva shadow to escape from. But Ben Mankiewicz has been able to shine his own light for the past 17 years — and shine a light on films worthy of discovery — as a host on Turner Classic Movies. The 53-year-old broadcaster, who also contributes reported segments to CBS Sunday Morning and co-hosts The Young Turks, never knew Herman J. Mankiewicz, who died in 1953. But the stories of his grandfather’s life and his commission from Orson Welles to write “Citizen Kane” have been passed down from generation to generation. Imagine Ben and his family’s astonishment that his grandfather’s life has now received the big-screen biopic treatment, courtesy of David Fincher’s “Mank.”

“We thought then, what we thought now,” Ben, who learned of the existence of Jack Fincher’s “Mank” screenplay 10 to 15 years ago, said. “Which is...

There was never any doubt that David Fincher was going to shoot “Mank” in black-and-white. His biopic about alcoholic and acerbic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) struggling to churn out a first draft of “Citizen Kane” cried out for monochromatic treatment. And yet Fincher and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (“Mindhunter”) were not about to indulge in a “Kane”-like re-enactment, or be confined to shooting on film, or composing in the period accurate aspect ratio of 1.37:1. Not with Fincher’s digital prowess and penchant for the 2.39: 1 widescreen format.

So Fincher and Messerschmidt struck a balance between retro and modern, taking advantage of the director’s efficient digital workflow to approximate the look of a movie made around the time of “Kane” in 1940 yet “Photographed in Hi-Dynamic Range” (as the title card proclaims).

“Filmmaking has always been a medium where we selectively employ the techniques that are available on the day,...

[Editor’s note: This article contains major spoilers about the plot of “Mank.”]

“Mank” is a lot to take in. Diehard fans of classic Hollywood cinema and “Citizen Kane” obsessives alike may be well-suited to parse David Fincher’s complex portrait of world-weary screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, but even then, this intricate black-and-white drama draws on a lot of reference points that a many audience members may not grasp the first time around.

The movie tracks two dueling narratives: Mank’s experiences in Hollywood throughout the ’30s, as he undergoes a falling out with Hollywood and studio moguls over their politics, and his decision to use his experiences in that world to write his greatest work — inspired by his former proximity to media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who became the template for the affluent mystery at the center of “Citizen Kane.”

But there’s more to “Mank” than that: Fincher, who draws on a script written decades ago by his late father Jack,...

Brought to life by a stellar cast of A-listers, David Fincher's Golden Era-styled Netflix drama, Mank, hops back and forth in time to develop a rounded picture of its troubled genius subject, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman). A love letter to the early days of Hollywood showbiz, the black-and-white film mostly follows the development of Citizen Kane. But how much of Mank is based on a true story, and how much of it is proverbial movie magic? While there's the occasional Hollywood flourish here and there, much of Mank is rooted in reality.

Did Mankiewicz Write Citizen Kane at a Ranch?

Early in the film, Mankiewicz, an established critic-turned-screenwriter, emerges from a car accident. He ends up at a quiet ranch in Victorville, CA, with a secretary named Rita Alexander (Lily Collins), who helps him type up the script for Citizen Kane. Filmmaker Orson Welles (Tom Burke) occasionally phones...

Class is now in session for Film History 101. And this will be on the final. Hopefully, that didn’t inspire too many nervous flashbacks, though I always looked forward to the few cinema courses I could take. Now the intro is spot on because this new film is mainly about another film that did make history, for lots of reasons. It truly stood out despite being produced during the second greatest year of Hollywood’s Golden Age (just two years after the prolific 1939). Yes, like 2012’s Hitchcock it is a biography of a very creative artist, but it focuses on one seminal work (Psycho for that earlier film). Oh, and instead of a director we now shine a much-deserved spotlight on the lowly, neglected writer, much like 2015’s Trumbo. Well perhaps in this case not too neglected since he shared in the classic film’s only Oscar win. That iconic masterpiece is Citizen Kane,...

Citizen Kane wouldn’t be Citizen Kane without Herman J. Mankiewicz, the man who co-wrote—or perhaps even solely wrote—Orson Welles’s 1941 masterwork, almost without getting credit. Eighty years later, David Fincher’s Mank offers a portrait of the unsung scribe, played by Gary Oldman as a bed-ridden alcoholic drumming out a script that would crib from his real-life sojourn at the court of media titan William Randolph Hearst. But Mank, penned by Fincher’s late father Jack, isn’t particularly interested in chronicling Kane’s genesis, or the war Hearst waged to halt its release. Nor is it concerned with settling the authorship feud between Welles and Mankiewicz. “An imaginative weave of scholarship and speculation,” as Justin Chang calls it over at the L.A. Times, the film:…tiptoes deftly through that partisan minefield, celebrating its hero’s work without succumbing to Welles erasure. The astounding accomplishment of...

A lot of movies about old Hollywood celebrate the opulence of the studio system or revel in the caricatures of the cigar-chomping moguls who established its lore. “Mank” chips away at those old chestnuts from the inside. David Fincher’s alluring black-and-white take on “Citizen Kane” screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (an acerbic and funny Gary Oldman) presents .

Though forged in a meticulous 1930s backdrop that merges historical detail with the style and tone of that era, “Mank” is hardly a playful throwback. Fincher has made a cerebral psychodrama that rewards the engaged cinephile audience in its crosshairs, but even when cold to the touch, the movie delivers a complex and insightful look at American power structures and the potential for a creative spark to rankle their foundations.

The premise of “Mank” invites certain assumptions about its argument, so it’s worth dispelling those up top: Fincher, working from a dense...

“You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression of one.” That’s a valuable piece of screenwriting advice offered up by legendary movie writer Herman J. Mankiewicz in “Mank,” but it’s also the film lowering the bar for itself – impressions of people and incidents are all that this immaculately produced and beautifully acted film ultimately has to offer.

In telling the story of the creation of the original screenplay for what would become “Citizen Kane,” one of the true masterpieces of American cinema, director David Fincher (working from a screenplay by his late father Jack Fincher) frames the film as the story of a career-dead, alcoholic Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) drumming out one final script partially to fulfill a contract with Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre but mainly to settle an old grudge against former benefactor William Randolph Hearst.

When you watch a biographical movie about an artist, the drama of creativity — the writing of “In Cold Blood,” the invention of funk — tends to be front and center. But in “Mank,” David Fincher’s raptly intricate and enticing movie about Herman J. Mankiewicz, the fabled screenwriter of ’30s and ’40s Hollywood, and how he wrote the script for “Citizen Kane,” the act of creation is just one of many things that flow by. That’s part of what gives the movie its uniquely atmospheric, at times tumultuous tone of you-are-there authenticity. , and the effect is to lend it a dizzying time-machine splendor.

In the opening sequence, 1930s cars tool along a California country roadway, kicking up dust in a way that’s captured with supreme luster by Eric Messerschmidt’s exquisitely retro deep-focus black-and-white cinematography. The cars arrive at North Verde Ranch in Victorville, about 90 miles from Los Angeles,...

A valentine to Hollywood it’s not. “Mank” marks David Fincher’s return to the two-hour movie after a sojourn in Netflix series television. His 11th feature film came about when content execs Ted Sarandos and Cindy Holland asked their “House of Cards” and “Mindhunter” creator if he had something he’d always wanted to do.

It turns out he’d kept his father’s Jack’s script for “Mank” in the trunk for decades. (Jack Fincher died in 2003.) Fincher dusted off the movie, which tells the controversial backstory of how one-time MGM screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz wrote “Citizen Kane” for Rko and New York wunderkind Orson Welles (Tom Burke), and had to fight to get screen credit. (They shared the film’s only Oscar in 1942.)

Any self-respecting cinephile will revel in this gloriously mounted black-and-white flashback to the Golden Age of Hollywood, where the wittiest Algonquin writers slummed for...

A valentine to Hollywood it’s not. “Mank” marks David Fincher’s return to the two-hour movie after a sojourn in Netflix series television. His 11th feature film came about when content execs Ted Sarandos and Cindy Holland asked their “House of Cards” and “Mindhunter” creator if he had something he’d always wanted to do.

It turns out he’d kept his father’s Jack’s script for “Mank” in the trunk for decades. (Jack Fincher died in 2003.) Fincher dusted off the movie, which tells the controversial backstory of how one-time MGM screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz wrote “Citizen Kane” for Rko and New York wunderkind Orson Welles (Tom Burke), and had to fight to get screen credit. (They shared the film’s only Oscar in 1942.)

Any self-respecting cinephile will revel in this gloriously mounted black-and-white flashback to the Golden Age of Hollywood, where the wittiest Algonquin writers slummed for...

The first reactions for David Fincher’s “Mank” are in from film critics and journalists and they’re strong, although the script’s dense storytelling sounds like it won’t appeal to everyone. Netflix scored 10 Oscar nominations for Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” earlier this year across above- and below-the-line categories, and it seems like “Mank” could be heading toward double-digit noms as critics are raving about its cinematography, production design, costumes, and acting, notably Gary Oldman and Amanda Seyfried.

“Mank” marks a passion project for Fincher, who has been working on the project since before he made his feature directing debut with “Alien 3” in 1992. Fincher’s father, journalist Jack Fincher, is the credited screenwriter of “Mank,” although Fincher and Eric Roth spent time reworking Jack’s original script over the years. The film stars Oldman as Oscar winner Herman J. Mankiewicz and follows the Hollywood screenwriter as he...

There’s a quote out there floating in the American ether, often misattributed to Upton Sinclair, that reads “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.” Amazon Prime’s The Boys takes this quote and concludes “Kinda subtle. Why not have it shoot lasers out of its eyes too?”

The first season of The Boys, based on the comic of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, was an in-depth exploration of all the creative and colorful ways fascism can come to America. It combined hero worship, celebrity culture, unhinged capitalism, and diseased politics into a view of a country where superheroes really are the ubermensches fascist were waiting for. Understandably, many reviews and critics thought this was all a bit…on the nose. But since the show premiered in July of 2019, reality has decided to shove our noses into...

Saying that the WGA and its members “will not be bullied” by the talent agencies, Chris Keyser, the co-chair of the guild’s agency negotiating committee, said in a video released Wednesday that Association of Talent Agents never made a real offer for a new franchise agreement before negotiations broke off April 12, when the guild ordered its members to fire all their agents en masse who refused to sign its new Agency Code of Conduct.

“The truth is, our agents walked away from us, when they refused to sign the Code,” Keyser said in the 16-minute video. (Watch it here.)

“They have not put any offer on the table that addresses our fundamental demand that they realign their financial interests with ours,” he said. “Their proposal, made right before the second deadline, of nothing on affiliated studios – and less than a penny on the dollar on packaging – is not an offer.

Metrics can be a devil indeed.

Twitter, for instance, said as part of its recent earnings announcement that it would stop reporting its monthly active user headcount. Understandable, given that its MAUs keep dropping as the company dumps millions of nefarious, fake, and dead accounts. Instead, in a letter to shareholders, Twitter said it will report a number that's actually growing, monetizable daily active users.

Apple did something of the same thing last fall, telling distressed shareholders it would no longer report iPhone unit sales, which have plateaued in the maturing mobile sector. To its credit, Apple will instead will focus on reporting revenues, which literally are the bottom line, rather than the funny-money of some social-media metrics.

Which brings us to Facebook, scorched again this week by an official British investigation that deemed it a "digital gangster" (gotta love the Brits' lively way with the mother tongue), setting...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAmy Heckerling on the set of the Off Broadway musical of her film Clueless.We are delighted by the news shared by the New York Times that American auteur Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) is producing an Off-Broadway musical of her pop culture landmark film (and so much more!), Clueless. For more on the director, read our 2016 interview.Recommended VIEWINGMarcelo Martinessi's lovely debut film The Heiresses, a delicate drama focusing on the self-discovery of a wealthy, middle-aged queer women in Paraguay, gets an English trailer. We reviewed the film at the 68th Berlinale held earlier this year.The Criterion Collection produced this lovely video exploring the birth and programming vision of New York's Walter Reade cinema. Recommended READINGIt's that time of the year again: Year-end lists of the best films of 2018 have...

New company unveils three films, two TV series on debut slate.

Chris Coen, the producer of Funny Games, The Childhood Of A Leader and Shadow Dancer, has launched London-based finance and production outfit Upper Street Entertainment.

The company’s debut slate features three projects now moving towards production.

They include The Girl With A Clock For A Heart, which will be directed by Harry Brown filmmaker Daniel Barber from a script by James Marsh and Sam Barron. The film is based on the book by Peter Swanson and follows a young professor as he faces a dangerous obsession from his past.

Only two Gold Derby Oscar Experts who’ve seen “Bohemian Rhapsody’ have updated their Best Actor predictions since Fox unveiled it to a select crowd of award voters and journos on its Century City lot last night, but Peter Travers (Rolling Stone) and I both just pushed Rami Malek up into second place behind Bradley Cooper (“A Star Is Born”).

Expect more Oscarologists to shove Malek higher up on their rankings, too – even to number one? – over the next week as “Bohemian Rhapsody” unspools at more industry screenings across Hollywood. There’s an embargo on film reviews, but suffice it to say that Malek delivers, wows, bedazzles and seizes your heart in a performance guaranteed to be a leading Oscar contender for Best Actor. Maybe even the winner.

SEELatest Best Actor predictions by 21 top Oscar Experts

Up until last night there was huge skepticism that Malek could pull off Freddie Mercury...

Exactly 10 years ago at the 80th Academy Awards, Daniel Day-Lewis won his second Oscar as Best Actor. As he arrived on stage, he bowed before “queen” Helen Mirren as she used the statuette to knight him for his victory in “There Will Be Blood” (watch the video above).

After his surprise Oscar win for “My Left Foot” at the 1990 ceremony almost two decades earlier, Day-Lewis had become an official A-List star. He followed with memorable performances throughout the early 1990s, including “The Last of the Mohicans” and Martin Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence.” He then received an additional Oscar nomination for “In the Name of the Father,” playing the wrongfully convicted Gerry Conlin but lost the award to Tom Hanks for “Philadelphia.”

See Daniel Day-Lewis movies: Top 12 greatest films ranked from worst to best

Then came a rather slow period in Day-Lewis’ career, making no movies between 1997 and 2002. He...

Today’s Google Doodle shines a light on one of the seminal figures in film history: Sergei Eisenstein, whose career is most commonly boiled down in World Cinema 101 classes as being the pioneer behind the Soviet Union’s use of montage in propaganda movies following the October Revolution. Eisenstein, who would have turned 120 years old today, was a true believer in the Bolshevik Revolution — and only 20 years old when he left his architecture and engineering studies to join Vladimir Lenin’s Red Army. Just seven years later he would become the genius young filmmaker and theorist behind Soviet montage, creating historical propaganda films that promoted the tenets of Communism and celebrate the Revolution in films like “Strike,” “October,” and, most famously, “Battleship Potemkin.”

From the beginning of film history, there had been exploration of how the new medium’s unique ability to cut through space with the edit could be...

The third season of “Channel Zero” is almost here, and the latest installment of the Syfy series looks like a terrifying vision that Upton Sinclair and M.C. Escher would both be proud of.

“Channel Zero: Butcher’s Block” will continue in the series tradition, drawing from a popular viral Creepypasta tale. This time, Kerry Hammond’s “Search and Rescue Woods” is the inspiration for a season that follows Alice (Olivia Luccardi), a young woman struggling with an ominous threat to her newly adopted city. As she begins to investigate stories of impossibly constructed staircases, she discovers that that might be connected to some eerie neighborhood disappearances.

As this exclusive first look of the new season shows, that danger might have to do something with Alice’s older sister Zoe (Holland Roden) slowly being submerged into a bathtub filled with blood. Toss in a devious, bespectacled Rutger Hauer and a handful...

Looking back on this still-young century makes clear that 2007 was a major time for cinematic happenings — and, on the basis of this retrospective, one we’re not quite through with ten years on. One’s mind might quickly flash to a few big titles that will be represented, but it is the plurality of both festival and theatrical premieres that truly surprises: late works from old masters, debuts from filmmakers who’ve since become some of our most-respected artists, and mid-career turning points that didn’t necessarily announce themselves as such at the time. Join us as an assembled team, many of whom were coming of age that year, takes on their favorites.

Paul Thomas Anderson is, at heart, a poet. While firmly on the side of traditional narrative cinema, his films have always favored aesthetic and textual lyricism over purely prosaic storytelling, even the masterfully precise prose of professed...

The Oscar race isn’t over until the last movie screens, and this year one of the final contenders to be unveiled will be “Phantom Thread.” The drama marks the hugely anticipated reunion between Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis, who last worked together a decade ago on “There Will Be Blood.” The Upton Sinclair-inspired drama earned eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and gave Day-Lewis his second trophy for Best Actor (he’d make history and win a third for “Lincoln” five years later), so anyone would be foolish to underestimate just how big “Phantom Thread” will be this awards season.

Focus Features has been keeping a majority of the details surrounding the movie under lock and key, although the official trailer was finally released on October 23, teasing a gorgeously shot drama about the romantic obsessions of a self-destructive artist. “Phantom Thread” seems to operating...

Documentaries about the perils of meat and of the food processing industry have been seen before. Fast Food Nation and Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me are just a couple that come to mind. Of course there are much earlier precedents, such as Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel, The Jungle, published in 1906. No doubt Jonathan Safran Soer, who wrote Eating Animals, was aware of Sinclair’s novel when he penned his own bestselling book about the contemporary meat industry. Now the film based on Soer’s book, which had its world premiere in Telluride, may revive questions and concerns about American eating habits....

[…] Was one to believe that there was nowhere a god of hogs, to whom this hog personality was precious, to whom these hog squeals and agonies had a meaning? Who would take this hog into his arms and comfort him, reward him for his work well done, and show him the meaning of his sacrifice?—Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)1Regarding The Jungle, the socialist author Upton Sinclair remarked that although he’d meant to “aim for the public’s heart,” he’d accidentally “hit it in the stomach.” The novel, about the life of a Lithuanian meat packer in Chicago, was treated with shock and mortification. But the public’s disgust was largely in response to Sinclair’s reports of dirtied meat products, not the plight of the working class. The subsequent frenzy only further undermined the novel’s critique of capitalism, which was ultimately reduced to a matter of meat and hygiene.