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ASAP Rocky went to court yesterday for a preliminary hearing in the shooting case against him. There, ASAP Relli, the former ASAP Mob member who accused Rocky of shooting him in the hand in 2021, testified that Rocky told him, “I’ll kill you right now,” before opening fire four times.

Rocky had already pled not guilty to two counts of assault with a semi-automatic firearm after being arrested in April 2022 at LAX while returning from Barbados on a trip with his girlfriend (rumored wife) Rihanna.

Police also raided Rocky’s home in Los Angeles, reportedly finding a gun, but not the one used in the alleged shooting. Police also said they secured footage of the shooting, providing enough evidence to officially charge the rapper for assault.

Relli later sued Rocky and his lawyer Joe Tacopina for defamation, arguing that statements Tacopina made about Relli “trying to get money from Rocky” constituted slander.

According to TMZ, Tacopina cross-examined Relli, trying to expose inconsistencies in his story and questioning why he delayed going to law enforcement. Relli insisted that he only waited to report the alleged attack for fear of retaliation. He also denied that the report was a money play, while detailing how exactly the ASAP Mob members fell out.

We here at Uproxx have had our eyes (and ears) on Hovvdy since 2018 — and increasingly so with the releases of the Austin, Texas-based duo’s 2021 True Love album and 2022 Billboard For My Feelings EP. This morning, November 9, Hovvdy offered “Jean,” a chipper yet lovesick single that represents their first music since Billboard For My Feelings.

“‘Jean’ is a song about doing well for those you love,” Hovvdy’s Will Taylor said in a statement. “It’s tangled in self doubt and uncertainty yet meant to embrace both the joy and the complications of life.”

Taylor and Charlie Martin produced “Jean” alongside Andrew Sarlo and Ben Littlejohn. The single comes as Hovvdy is preparing to stage headlining tour dates in December before supporting Cold War Kids in February 2024.

Watch the “Jean” lyric video above, and check out all of Hovvdy’s upcoming tour dates below.

12/06 — Los Angeles, CA @ El Cid +
12/12 — Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall +
12/14 — Nashville, TN @ The Blue Room +
12/15 — Brooklyn, NY @ Public Records +
1/31/2024 — San Francisco, CA @ Fillmore *
2/01/2024 — Portland, OR @ Crystal Ballroom *
2/02/2024 — Vancouver, BC @ Vogue *
2/03/2024 — Seattle, WA @ Moore Theatre *
2/05/2024 — Boise, ID @ Knitting Factory *
2/06/2024 — Bozeman, MT @ The Elm *
2/08/2024 — Aspen, CO @ Belly Up *
2/09/2024 — Denver, CO @ Gothic Theater *
2/10/2024 — Denver, CO @ Gothic Theater *
2/13/2024 — Tulsa, OK @ Cain’s Ballroom *
2/15/2024 — Dallas, TX @ House Of Blues *
2/16/2024 — Houston, TX @ House Of Blues *
2/17/2024 — Austin, TX @ Stubbs *

+ duo tour
* supporting Cold War Kids

Nicki Minaj is on the new Vogue cover for December 2023, where she discussed various aspects of her career and personal life. One of these moments was about a time when Minaj had been living in Atlanta to work on her career. After experiencing menstrual cramps, she was prescribed Percocet — but the way she was taking it soon went beyond using it for the standard pain.

“No one told me that this was a narcotic and this was addictive,” Minaj said. “Luckily I was able to ground myself. But — once an addict, always an addict. I feel like if you’ve ever experienced addiction to anything, which I have, you always have to think twice and three times about the choices that you make.”

Minaj pointed out that many big stars struggled with self-medication as a way of escapism. She also reflected on the history of addiction in her own family, as her late father struggled with hard substance abuse — and that her mom didn’t really understand it.

“I think about watching my father go back and forth, and I just wish that at the time I understood that he wasn’t doing it because he wanted to,” she said. “I thought that he was making a conscious effort to be addicted to a drug that would have him steal his children’s video games and sell them for money. Think about that — who would make a conscious effort to do that? Now I realize, those people weren’t making those choices because they wanted to hurt their family. Addiction took over their bodies and their lives. They were victims too.”

The time has come for Dua Lipa to introduce her first full-fledged era since Future Nostalgia, her chart-topping 2020 album. Well, almost. Lipa is set to release “Houdini” at 11 p.m. GMT on Thursday, November 9, which converts to 3 p.m. PST and 6 p.m. EST. (Pop Crave did the math for us and handled all global time conversions for the “Houdini” release.) Still, US listeners won’t be able to stream “Houdini” on Apple Music until 9 p.m. PST and midnight EST. The same rules apply for Spotify users.

“Houdini” and its release date were confirmed on Wednesday, November 1 — weeks after Lipa went full Mysterious Barbie and wiped her social media accounts, and then shared an up-close photo of her smiling with a key lodged in her teeth to Instagram alongside the caption, “catch me or I go…”

In what is surely not a coincidence at all, Lipa billed her “three surprise launch events for ‘Houdini‘” as “Catch Me Or I go…” The events are scheduled for London (on November 9), Los Angeles (November 14), and Tokyo (November 20).

All signs point toward “Houdini” being the lead single for Lipa’s hotly anticipated third studio album, which she very vaguely teased with Kurt Soller for The New York Times’ T Magazine in August.

“The next record will still be pop, she says, lest her ‘fans have a meltdown,’” Soller wrote. “She doesn’t want to ‘alienate’ them, although she’s developing a new sound that may be informed less by the house and disco beats beneath songs like ‘Physical’ and ‘Hallucinate’ than by 1970s-era psychedelia. She’s working with a smaller group of songwriting collaborators, supposedly including Kevin Parker of the Australian psych-rock band Tame Impala, a rumor she all but confirms by denying: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she says, then looks away and laughs a little.”

Dua Lipa is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

It brings me great pleasure to report that Fargo returns for a fifth installment on November 21. It’s been three full years since our last go-round with the show, which is probably too long, especially since the fourth installment… left something to be desired. It was fine, mostly, and better than most shows that aren’t named Fargo, but it didn’t quite live up to the high standards set in the first three. Again, it was fine. Again, I was looking for something more.

This new installment has the show back, though, at least through the first few episodes that I’ve seen. We are having some fun. And murdering people. Jon Hamm has a cowboy hat. It’s a really good time. Let’s get into it all.

PART I: We have another murderous little mystery on our hands

Let’s just go ahead and drop in the official description of the action from FX, for the sake of efficiency.

After an unexpected series of events lands “Dorothy ‘Dot’ Lyon” (Juno Temple) in hot water with the authorities, this seemingly typical Midwestern housewife is suddenly plunged back into a life she thought she had left behind.

North Dakota Sheriff “Roy Tillman” (Jon Hamm) has been searching for Dot for a long time. A rancher, preacher and a constitutional lawman, Roy believes that he is the law and therefore is above the law. At his side is his loyal but feckless son, “Gator” (Joe Keery), who is desperate to prove himself to his larger-than-life father. Too bad he’s hopeless. So, when it comes to hunting Dot, Roy enlists “Ole Munch” (Sam Spruell), a shadowy drifter of mysterious origin.

With her deepest secrets beginning to unravel, Dot attempts to shield her family from her past, but her doting, well-meaning husband “Wayne” (David Rysdahl) keeps running to his mother, “Lorraine Lyon” (Jennifer Jason Leigh), for help. CEO of the largest Debt Collection Agency in the country, the “Queen of Debt” is unimpressed with her son’s choice in a wife and spares no opportunity to voice her disapproval. However, when Dot’s unusual behavior catches the attention of Minnesota Police Deputy “Indira Olmstead” (Richa Moorjani) and North Dakota Deputy “Witt Farr” (Lamorne Morris), Lorraine appoints her in-house counsel and primary advisor, “Danish Graves” (Dave Foley) to aid her daughter-in-law. Afterall, family is family. But Dot has an uncanny knack for survival. And with her back to the wall, she’s about to show why one should never provoke a mother Lyon.

Look at what we have here:

• A Midwestern housewife thrust into an old life that requires a knack for survival
• A sheriff who believes he is above the law and has a feckless son named Gator
• Shadowy drifters named Ole Munch
• The Queen of Debt
• A lawyer named Danish Graves who, spoiler alert, wears an eyepatch

This is the good stuff, people. Please savor it.

PART II: Juno Temple is having a blast

I suspect many of you are mostly familiar with Juno Temple from her work on Ted Lasso as Keeley, a glamour model and girlfriend of a cranky soccer star. That’s cool. She’s great in that role, bringing a humanity and comic timing to a character that probably reads as less than that on paper. This is not that Juno Temple. I mean, it is, to some degree, especially as it relates to the comic timing, but there’s something much darker here. And she’s losing the British accent for a Midwestern one. She seems to be enjoying it a lot.

Please watch her in that short clip up there, in which she has her home littered with weapons and booby traps like she’s Kevin McAllister in Home Alone. I really cannot stress in strong enough terms that Juno Temple rules very hard in the early parts of the season that I’ve seen. Some of that might get lost in the Jon Hamm of it all for reasons I will discuss in Part II, but it’s important to note. So this is me doing that.

PART III: Hey, have you missed Menacing Jon Hamm?

Jon Hamm has been crushing it lately. We’ve discussed this. He’s been popping up in dozens of shows for the last few years, often in silly little roles, sometimes playing, “What if Elon Musk was devastatingly handsome?” alongside Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, almost always looking like he has things figured out in a way most of us should be envious of. But it’s been a while since we’ve seen him be a little menacing. Since we saw him give that icy stare and full portrayal of confidence he became famous for on Mad Men. Since he responded to someone saying they feel bad for him by staring straight ahead and replying “I don’t think about you at all.” Since… any of that.

This is not exactly that Jon Hamm. This one is a little darker. Sheriff Roy takes the law into his own hands in a way that is maybe not admirable or even moral. But dammit if he isn’t magnetic to watch. There’s a scene in the second episode where the FBI shows up to question him while he’s relaxing in an outdoor bathtub with a cigar in his mouth and some very surprising jewelry on his body that really sets the tone for his character in a way only someone like Jon Hamm can pull off.

It’s nice to see him like this again. I love a goofy Jon Hamm. I’m on record saying that in many places. But it’s nice to be a little scared of him, too. This is very good business here.

PART IV: It’s just really nice to have Fargo back

It is. There are so many little twists and quirks in this show that make it unlike anything else on television. The accent work remains delightful, with lots of Midwesternisms that don’t often end up on the screen elsewhere, and yes, I am referring here specifically to the thing where Juno Temple makes pancakes but calls it “makin’ Bisquick.” Jennifer Jason Leigh is great, too, with a thick Ivy League accent that turns words like what and why into “hhhhhhhwhat” and “hhhhhwhy.” Her character is lovely and terrifying. Joe Keery from Stranger Things plays a puffed-chest failson named Gator, which is just a lot of fun to type out, which is the main reason I did it, just ahead of informing you all that Joe Keery from Stranger Things plays a puffed-chest failson named Gator. Look at that. I did it again.

There’s also the, uh, violence. Just a whole bunch of it. Homemade flamethrowers, baseball bats with nails sticking out of them, people getting body parts chopped off, all of it. It’s such a strange show, with the silliest stuff you’ve ever seen interspersed with the most graphically violent, and yet, when it works, it just really, really works. It’s nice to have something so relentlessly original on television like this. I’m so happy it’s back. I have no idea of how things will land after the opening few episodes I saw so far, but at the very least I am excited to find out. That’s really all you can ask for from a start to a show.

That and Jon Hamm in a cowboy hat.

PART V: I am very excited for everyone to hear Juno Temple say “hoosegow” in a Minnesota accent

You won’t have to wait long, either. Until then, please watch the trailer again and get a little pumped up. One of our best shows is on its way, just in time for the long and dark winter. Bundle up.

The trial for the racketeering case against Young Thug still has yet to begin in earnest but today, the rapper got some bad news. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Ural Glanville ruled this morning that his lyrics could be used against him in court despite the controversy surrounding that aspect of the case.

While the specific lyrics in question have always been public record thanks to the 88-page indictment against Thug and YSL, prosecutors read those lyrics aloud in court, arguing that they “prove the nature of YSL as a racketeering enterprise [and] the expectations of YSL as a criminal street gang,” according to Assistant District Attorney Mike Carlson.

The lyrics being used against Thug include snippets from songs like 2018’s “Just How It Is”:

“I just beat a murder rap, paid my lawyer 30 for that”

From 2014’s “Eww”:

“Honestly truth be told YSL won’t fold / Pick his ass off from the balcony/ YSL wipe a n**** nose”

From “Bad Boy” with Juice WRLD:

“I shot at his mommy, now he no longer mention me”

“Take It To Trial” with Gunna:

“I rep my life for real/For slimes you know I kill”

Critics of the case say that it discounts the probability of artistic license, that Young Thug is like an actor playing a role in songs like these, or speaking from perspectives not his own. Furthermore, as HipHopDX notes, some of the lyrics are incorrect or misattributed, pointing to shoddy casework on the part of the DA.

Young Thug is accused of being the head of a criminal street gang, YSL, which is collectively accused of crimes including murder, armed robbery, and more. The controversy surrounding the use of lyrics as evidence prompted an array of bills to limit such use, including one federal bill still in Congress. States such as California have already passed their own versions.

On Friday, the 12th film by David Fincher, The Killer, will arrive on Netflix after a brief theatrical run. It’s about a professional assassin (Michael Fassbender) who loves The Smiths and making dad jokes about sitcom characters from the ’70s and ’80s. Which means if he didn’t murder people for a living, he would be pretty relatable! The Killer is everything you want from a David Fincher movie: the violence is perfectly staged and incredibly thrilling, the performances are nuanced and convincing, and it’s a lot funnier than a movie this dark and nihilistic has any right to be.

In honor of The Killer, I decided to go back into Fincher’s filmography. I knew I had already seen all of his films, but I didn’t realize that I had seen multiple films multiple times. For a guy who has depicted more than his share of on-screen brutality, Fincher makes incredibly watchable films that only improve upon repeat viewings. Some movies are better than others, of course, but there isn’t an outright clunker in the bunch.

Join me as I dig into the work of David Fincher. You better lawyer up, a**holes! I’m not here for 30 percent of his movies. I’m here … for everything.

Pre-List Entertainment: The Best Music Videos Directed By David Fincher, Ranked

David Fincher is one of the great working directors in modern cinema. Practically everyone agrees with this. But he is inarguably the greatest director of music videos from the late ’80s and early ’90s. Not that Fincher himself would brag about this. For him, making music videos and commercials in the ’80s was the means to achieve the end of becoming a filmmaker in the ’90s. Nevertheless, for me, his music videos represent some of my very favorite David Fincher work. Before we delve into his filmography, I would like to briefly discuss five of his best music videos.

5. Billy Idol, “Cradle Of Love” (1990)

The premise of this video concerns a nerdy man (actually a very good-looking male model-type who just happens to be wearing glasses, She’s All That style) whose life is upended by a beautiful young woman who shows up at his apartment and proceeds to gyrate suggestively to the first single from the fourth Billy Idol album. On paper, it reads like a million other cheeseball videos that aired on MTV between 1986 and the release of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” But “Cradle Of Love” is not “only” that. “Cradle Of Love” also explains who David Fincher is as an artist.

The most important thing to understand about David Fincher is that if anyone else directed his films, they would be 100 percent trashier and 1,000 percent shittier. Pundits frequently use adjectives like “visceral” and “subversive” to describe his work, but if a less brilliant stylist were to draw on David Fincher’s source material those same pundits would be moved to apply descriptors such as “junky” and “Lifetime Channel-esque.” As Fincher recently told The Guardian, “I will never be a more mature filmmaker. I will carry the 12-year-old me with me wherever I go.” Because it’s David Fincher, you might think he’s being falsely modest. But he’s telling the truth. Put him in the context of his peers: Would Paul Thomas Anderson dare to make a movie out of a down-market best seller like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? Would Steven Soderbergh ever deign to take a de rigueur beach read like Gone Girl seriously? Imagine Wes Anderson directing multiple serial killer flicks. It’s like trying to envision Quentin Tarantino or Sofia Coppola making a movie about Facebook.

David Fincher’s skill made these exercises seem way more artful than they would otherwise be. Without him, Seven starts to look a lot like Saw. Without him, Gone Girl hews closer to Stalked By My Doctor territory. Without him, Fight Club really is the simple-minded incel bait that exists in the imaginations of that film’s detractors.

The same goes for “Cradle Of Love.” Without him, it would be like a typical late ’80s Whitesnake video.

4. Paula Abdul, “Cold Hearted” (1989)

But what is “Cradle Of Love” with David Fincher? I’ll quote the nameless yuppie at the start of the video for “Cold Hearted”: “Tastefully hot.” “Cradle Of Love” is tastefully hot, and “Cold Hearted” is also tastefully hot. Now, I was entering puberty during this period, and I will concede that my brain was not yet developed enough to fully appreciate the difference between the cinematic fillet that is “tastefully hot” and the more common music-video crapola known as “tawdry hot.” But even I could discern that the visual tableaux presented in “Cradle Of Love” and “Cold Hearted” was more carefully considered than whatever the director for Winger’s “Seventeen” was doing.

It was several years after Paula Abdul’s pop career came and went that I recognized the central film-geek reference point of “Cold Hearted” — the super sultry “Take Off With Us” dance sequence from Bob Fosse’s 1979 meta-musical masterpiece All That Jazz. Fincher has claimed to have watched Fosse’s film 200 times, and he’s often placed it among his favorite movies on lists such as this one. What’s immediately apparent about that list is how recognizable the 26 films are — there are no obscure European art flicks or barely known underground cult classics. Fincher favors Chinatown and All The President’s Men and The French Connection and The Godfather Part II, all movies that are critical of American culture while also speaking to the mainstream of American culture. And this, also, explains a lot about David Fincher, the bad-boy auteur who is also the most commercially minded “great director” of his generation.

3. Madonna, “Bad Girl” (1993)

Fincher made five videos with Abdul, and he understood intuitively what to emphasize (her dancing) and how to make up for what was lacking (her voice). His videos were credited with making Abdul’s 1989 debut Forever Your Girl a commercial blockbuster. (More important, Fincher did not direct the most infamously corny Paula Abdul video from this era, the MC Skat Kat co-starring “Opposites Attract.”) He also left a lasting impression on the performer — in the 2011 oral history I Want My MTV, Abdul praised Fincher for having “an inner strength that’s very sexy.”

After Abdul, Fincher’s most frequent music-video leading lady was Madonna, with whom he worked four times. Two of those videos, “Express Yourself” and “Vogue,” are among the most iconic MTV clips ever. But I’m going instead with “Bad Girl,” the final Madonna-Fincher collaboration and the most movie-like. Madonna plays the titular bad girl as an homage to Diane Keaton’s sexually adventurous heroine from 1977’s Looking For Mr. Goodbar, with Christopher Walken presiding over it all as the Angel Of Death. At the time, Fincher had already crashed and burned at the box office with his misbegotten debut as a film director, Alien 3. Retreating to the music-video world might have registered as a defeat, but “Bad Girl” showed that he was honing the neo-noir style that he would eventually take to the bank.

2. Aerosmith, “Janie’s Got A Gun” (1989)

Speaking of neo-noir, this is the ur-text for what Fincher will later do in films like Seven, Zodiac, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. All of the elements are in place — the feeling of overpowering dread, the threat of violence (sexual or otherwise), the sumptuous images of beautiful people being degraded, the suggestion that these figures signify a deeper societal rot. Plus, there is a hit power ballad from a late-’80s Aerosmith album. Here is another example of Fincher elevating his material to unforeseen heights. I cringe at the thought of what Nigel Dick or Jeff Stein might have done with “Janie’s Got A Gun.” Whereas in Fincher’s hands, Steven Tyler not only comes across as a moral figurehead but as a moral figurehead on the subject of sexual assault, which — truth be told — is sicker and more perverse than anything in Fight Club.

(My one criticism of Fincher’s direction is that the lecherous father who Janie shoots and kills looks like he’s 26 and ready for a Calvin Klein ad. His finely chiseled good looks are inappropriate for the role, especially since the actress who portrays Janie looks like she’s 24. On a purely aesthetic level, their coupling is way too visually attractive for the setting. John Carroll Lynch was also 26 the year this video was made, but I’m guessing he already was more credible for this kind of part.)

1. George Michael, “Freedom! ’90” (1990)

You have a handsome pop superstar who no longer wants to appear in his videos. What do you do? You set his signature leather jacket on fire and assemble the Traveling Wilburys of late 20th century fashion models to appear in his place. Just as you don’t need to actually show Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in that box to prove she’s dead, you need not put George Michael on display in order to murder the mythology of 1987’s image-building Faith. You can just invent a new mythology for supermodels to replace it.

This is cinematic invention. This is proof that you are officially too talented to be making music videos. This is why you must have faith in his sound. It’s the one good thing that he’s got.

Now, let’s get to David Fincher’s films.

12. The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (2008)

One of the more infamous footnotes in Fincher’s career is his short-lived feud with fellow Gen X auteur Paul Thomas Anderson. For those who have not obsessed over this as much as I have: It stemmed from a 2000 Rolling Stone interview in which PTA slammed Fight Club. The movie was so “unbearable” in Paul’s estimation that he wished testicular cancer on Fincher. The source of Anderson’s ire was the perception that Fight Club mocked cancer victims in the scene depicting Meat Loaf’s “bitch tits” after an orchiectomy, a sensitive topic given the death of Anderson’s father from cancer three years prior.

Apparently, the beef was quickly squashed: Anderson wrote Fincher an apology letter and publicly declared that his comments were “stupid.” But PTA’s quote lingered long enough in cinephile lore for Rolling Stone to bring it up to Fincher in a 2021 interview, to which he responded with graceful diplomacy. The “bitch tits” scene was satirizing the trauma tourism of Edward Norton’s character, not the struggles of the traumatized, he explained. But Fincher also understood why a person who recently lost a family member would react the way PTA did, even if PTA at the time was also a budding bad-boy auteur who had just flashed Mark Wahlberg’s big fat fake penis on screen in Boogie Nights.

Prospects for a juicy feud aside, I think what this story really speaks to is Fincher’s reputation as a cynic, the kind of man who really would belittle those afflicted with a terrible disease, a cold Kubrickian figure who doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt even in a preposterous scenario involving the guy from Bat Out Of Hell wearing prosthetic breasts.

I don’t know how much that perception played into Fincher’s decision to direct The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, his most un-Fincher-like film. Fincher has said that he was moved to make the movie after his own father died of cancer in 2003. The resulting film is as fascinated with the grotesqueries of death as Seven, but it’s the more mundane grotesqueries perpetrated by the passage of time (rather than a serial killer). It works most effectively in the first third (when Brad Pitt is a geriatric baby) and in the final third (when Brad Pitt is a baby-faced geriatric) then in the goopy middle, where Brad Pitt looks like Brad Pitt but acts like a sexy Forrest Gump.

It’s not a bad film. (Yadda yadda-ing the usual plaudits for Fincher’s impeccable technique that I will be saluting in greater depth later in this column.) But it is his classiest movie, starting with source material derived from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who has nothing on Gillian Flynn when it comes to providing Fincher with the red meat he needs to really send his freak flag flying. For a man uniquely gifted at transforming schlocky material into cinematic profundity, a work of literary merit winds up being an “inversely proportional quality” proposition.

11. Mank (2020)

Benjamin Button was the first of four consecutive Fincher films released in the late aughts and early 2010s that grossed at least $200 million, and one of the two films in that run (with Gone Girl) to make over $300 million. All of them were made primarily for adult audiences. And none of them would likely be made for movie theaters today. It’s possible — even probable — that these movies (which also include The Social Network and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) would be refashioned into “limited run” streaming TV series.

Whenever Fincher is interviewed now, his accidental but crucial role in the marginalization of film culture is a frequent topic of conversation. This is due, of course, to his involvement in House Of Cards, the first original Netflix series, which dropped in early 2013. The following year, the last Fincher film to receive a significant theatrical run, Gone Girl, scored big at the box office. In 2023, you can still choose to see a new Fincher movie on the big screen. You just might have to work a little harder. I live in an American city with a population north of 1 million, and last month I ventured to one of the three theaters in my area playing The Killer for a mid-day screening attended by three other people (two of whom were sitting with me). But it seems like the days when a new movie by one of the last remaining name-brand directors is a “leave your house” phenomenon are behind us.

I am a 46-year-old man who was raised on 1970s “New Hollywood” cinema and who came of age watching the emerging 1990s indie-film masters, so I am inclined to lament this as a great tragedy. But if we can dwell for a moment on the sliver of light in this modern cultural hellscape: Mank would absolutely not exist without Netflix. Now, I’m not sure Mank would exist even with Netflix in 2023, given the shrinkage of content in post-pandemic, almost post-strike Hollywood. But the fact is that Fincher did get it out in the world in 2020 after trying and failing to convince studios to back his passion project going back to the mid-’90s. And that is a miracle given that Mank is by far the niche-iest movie in his canon, a Citizen Kane tribute (already a commercially dubious endeavor) that doesn’t center the one person from that movie (Orson Welles) that non-cinephiles might recognize. But since this is David Fincher, it’s only natural that his least accessible film is also his tenderest. Working with a screenplay written by his late father Jack, Fincher fashioned a film that Manohla Dargis later classified as “eulogistic.” She meant that in a broader “end of cinema” sense, but it also applies to the effort of a son exhausting his tech-platform capital to finally realize his dad’s cinematic ambitions.

10. Alien 3 (1992)

People often classify Be Here Now as the worst Oasis album because Noel Gallagher has talked over and over about how terrible Be Here Now is. The same goes for Alien 3 and David Fincher — he once likened the process of making Alien 3 to being “sodomized ritualistically for two years” and has said that “to this day, no one hates [the film] more than me.” If a director despises what he has made that much, it seems natural for the audience to follow his direction. Especially when you have a film that resists affection as violently as this one. If the setting (an ugly planet converted into a drab prison colony) and the supporting characters (bald-headed misogynist creeps) don’t turn you off, perhaps you will be interested in witnessing an autopsy performed on the adorable little girl from Aliens.

David Fincher is a master at creating nightmarish images that are simultaneously horrific and beautiful. But Alien 3 is easily the least attractive movie he’s made. Whereas even the most psychologically scarring sequences in his filmography have a hypnotic quality that make them compulsively rewatchable, sitting through Alien 3 feels like hard work. And yet I put it at No. 10 because — no matter Fincher’s own perception of it as a compromised film — Alien 3 retains a weird, singular integrity. Particularly in retrospect, in our current moment of deadly dull franchise IP stagnation, this movie’s brutal bleakness stands out as artistically courageous. Only David Fincher could look at a would-be blockbuster that ends — spoiler alert, though I suspect Alien 3 is the last film on this list anyone will want to revisit — with Ripley committing suicide by throwing herself into a fiery pit while an alien baby explodes out of her stomach as a half-measure. By any other standard, Alien 3 must be counted among the most daring summer genre movies ever released by a major studio, no matter its questionable entertainment value.

Also: Alien 3 is really well made! Roger Ebert called it “one of the best-looking bad movies I have ever seen,” and that sums it up pretty much perfectly. There’s a reason David Fincher did not go the way of Josh Trank after Alien 3 tanked at the box office. Even when he whiffed, he whiffed with style.

9. Panic Room (2002)

If you read a lot of David Fincher interviews, or you watch him speak with journalists via videos posted on YouTube, you will notice that he tends to recycle the same bits. This isn’t all his fault — a usual talking point for interlocutors is the number of takes that Fincher demands from his actors, which always (understandably) annoys him and prompts his canned explanation about making the most of all the money that pays for a day’s work on set. Other than that, however, Fincher is fond of re-using the same anecdotes — the one about discovering the joy of filmmaking from a behind-the-scenes documentary about Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, the one about how his dad warned him as a boy about the at-large Zodiac killer threatening school buses in Marin County without offering to drive him to school, the one about re-writing the script for Fight Club at Brad Pitt’s house, and so on.

You could chalk up these interview tics to Fincher’s exacting nature, or his reticence about revealing too much about himself. Compared with compulsive over-sharers like Tarantino and PTA, Fincher remains an enigma more than 30 years after his first film. Or maybe Fincher just needs to be interviewed by Ben Affleck. This 2020 video timed with the release of Mank is one of the best Fincher interviews I’ve seen, mostly because Affleck is a fellow filmmaker who affords Fincher the space to get granular about his process. The best bit comes late in the video when Affleck brings up the book that Fincher prepared for Panic Room containing his micro-managed plans for the production, from camera moves to blocking to (presumably) snack assortments for the craft services table.

“Don’t ever do this!” Affleck recalls Fincher warning him.

Panic Room actually doesn’t seem any more overdetermined than any other Fincher movie. What it lacks is an underlying point — it’s only a perfectly conceived construction, like a luxury car outfitted with every amenity except for a place to go. It’s a lot of fun to watch and very difficult to remember. Every participant avails themselves professionally, but only Jared Leto and Dwight Yoakam appear to be enjoying themselves. As for Fincher, Panic Room feels like the end of his 1.0 era. Afterward, he didn’t put out another movie for five years. He made commercials, cashed his commercial checks, and then set about his next phase, in which nothing he made would feel as impersonal as this movie.

8. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011)

I’ve used the word “auteur” three times so far in this column. Two of these instances were in reference to Fincher. And I know that he would hate this. Another frequent talking point in David Fincher interviews is that he does not think of himself as an auteur. He prefers to view himself as a hired gun. And that makes sense when you consider that Fincher — unlike those ’90s cinema peers I mentioned earlier — is not a screenwriter. Which is not to say he does not originate his ideas. (Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote Seven and The Killer and script-doctored other Fincher movies, has said that Fincher came up with the premise of the latter film.) But he isn’t responsible for the voice of his movies as completely as someone like Quentin Tarantino, which is something that Quentin Tarantino himself has pointed out and I’m sure Fincher would not dispute.

But in a less pedantic sense, David Fincher is an auteur through and through, because anyone who is familiar with his films can instantly identify the attributes of a David Fincher film. Here is one of those attributes: Ironic needle drops. He’s not nearly as prodigious at using pop songs as Tarantino, Sofia Coppola, or Wes/Paul Thomas Anderson, but he’s made his handful of famous needle drops count. Like Stanley Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange, he uses music as a counterpoint to shocking violence in Zodiac (Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man”) and Fight Club (Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind”). Less heralded (but even more striking) is the application of Enya’s icy new-age pop hit “Orinoco Flow” during the “Daniel Craig is tortured by Stellan Skarsgård in a S&M dungeon” sequence from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It’s a scene that reminds you that you’re watching a serial killer film directed by David Fincher — whose propensity for black comedy goes hand in hand with his flair for depicting imaginary sadistic mayhem — and not some nondescript studio hack.

7. The Killer (2023)

Fincher’s latest movie provides ample opportunity to analyze him via the auteur lens. It amounts to a compendium of his past stylistic flourishes. The use of The Smiths throughout the picture functions as an extended ironic needle drop. (The best sequence occurs early on during a critical moment scored to “How Soon Is Now?”) The disaffected and unreliable narration by the protagonist recalls Fight Club, as do the references to vampiric corporate culture. The main character is a dead-eyed murderer with a strict ethical code (like John Doe in Seven) whose attention to detail ensures that he will never be caught (like the killer in Zodiac). He is a genius who is destined to be an island onto himself (like Mark Zuckerberg), but he also has a surprisingly sentimental attachment to the woman in his life (like Benjamin Button or Daniel Craig in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo).

For those convinced that they can read into his films to uncover the depths of David Fincher’s heart and mind, The Killer also offers some tantalizing “armchair psychology”-flavored morsels. The obvious (and common) take is that Michael Fassbender’s fastidious assassin mirrors the film’s perfectionist director, and that Fincher is using this literal gun-for-hire to express personal revelations about his own artistic method. I’m not sure I buy that. The old Fincher film that reminds me most of this new Fincher film is Panic Room, in that it’s a vehicle for David Fincher to create a series of intense, suspenseful sequences that more often than not end with someone’s brains spilled all over an exquisitely art-directed movie set. And that’s about all it is. What makes The Killer a better film than Panic Room is that Fincher has 21 more years of filmmaking experience.

6. The Game (1997)

Let’s revisit the subject of filmmaker feuds involving David Fincher. One of his actual adversaries is Michael Bay, who similarly came up in the late ’80s as a music-video director and was known in the business by the semi-insulting nickname “Little Fincher.” In I Want My MTV, a mutual associate describes the Fincher vs. Bay dynamic thusly: “Fincher was sophisticated. He was inspired by great philosophers such as Robert Frank and Horst P. Horst. Bay was a technical genius like Fincher, but he had the mind of a teenager. His sensibility was juvenile.”

But are Fincher and Bay really that different? Jake Gyllenhaal once called them “radically similar” filmmakers, though it’s possible he was trolling Fincher after being annoyed by doing so many takes during the making of Zodiac. But as we have already established, Fincher self-identifies as an overgrown adolescent, not as a philosophy-obsessed intellectual. And his career arc is similar to Bay’s, with them both establishing themselves as hot-shot cinematic wunderkinds in 1995. Of course, Bay did it with Bad Boys, a movie that could be credibly described as the antithesis of Seven. And their paths only diverge more dramatically from there.

The Game came out the year between two Michael Bay films, 1996’s The Rock and 1998’s Armageddon. And, if you squint a little (or a lot), it’s the David Fincher film that most resembles a Michael Bay movie, i.e. it’s preposterous, brazenly illogical, and very enjoyable if you turn your brain off. Fincher famously said early in his career that he wanted to make films that scar, but The Game lives up (or down) to its title. It’s affecting, but it doesn’t put you through the ringer like Fincher’s best movies. It’s as psychologically complex as an amusement park ride.

That superficiality marks The Game as a minor film. But I have a soft spot for it, partly for nostalgia reasons (it came out the week I turned 20, and I remember seeing it opening weekend) and partly because (with the exception of The Social Network) this is the Fincher I most enjoy revisiting. It’s the rarest of Fincher films: a comfort watch.

5. Seven (1995)

This is not a comfort watch. Though it has been ripped off by virtually every serial killer movie and TV show that followed in its wake, which has inevitably diminished some of its original impact. Rewatching the movie for this column I was repeatedly struck by how conventional Seven seems now. The older black cop/younger white cop “buddy” dynamic, the maniacally ornate crime scenes, the constant rain, the “serial killer as philosopher” posturing, the extremely serious treatment of borderline campy material — again, the brand has been diluted more than Eduardo Saverin’s Facebook stock.

What hasn’t been diluted is the ending. I can still remember being dazed by Seven the first time I saw it — I was on a date with my first serious girlfriend, and I’m still not sure if this is the worst date movie (for obvious reasons) or an incredible date movie (for obvious reasons). The first time you see Seven, you do not expect Kevin Spacey to turn himself in with 30 minutes left in the picture. You do not expect him to kill Brad Pitt’s wife. You do not expect to learn this information from a delivery man bringing a box to a stretch of barren terrain. And you do not expect — this is the biggest shock of all — Brad Pitt to shoot Kevin Spacey in the head. This is an ending that goes right up to the line of what is expected from a movie like this and then steps over it several times in the final act. Only then do you realize that the familiar things you smugly pointed out during the opening two-thirds were setting you up for all of this.

4. Fight Club (1999)

This is, and always will be, David Fincher’s most polarizing film. Detractors dismiss it for at least one of the following three reasons.

1. The “wrong” people like it.

2. It’s a movie about “toxic” and “privileged” white guys who don’t “deserve” to feel angst about their lots in life.

3. Its anti-capitalism message is obvious and juvenile.

The first criticism is the weakest. Every work of art that reaches a mass audience will also appeal to a segment of unseemly individuals who enjoy it for problematic reasons. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of tech bros who were inspired to move to Silicon Valley because they saw The Social Network and adopted Mark Zuckerberg as an aspirational figure. This is not David Fincher’s fault, and it’s not David Fincher’s fault that sex-starved losers on the Internet love Fight Club. He is not responsible for our piss-poor media literacy. That’s on us.

The second criticism hinges on whether you see Fight Club as a satire or a celebration of contemporary masculinity. But even the “pro-satire” partisans view this film too narrowly. It’s true Fight Club is literally about professional men who beat each other up in parking lots, but this is also a metaphor for a story about how modernity has cut us off from the most essential parts of ourselves. And you don’t have to be a “toxic” male to grasp that. It’s true for everybody. We are all under the heel of capitalism. It’s the human condition.

The third criticism has virtually become the common sense take on Fight Club. Smart people frequently argue that this album is too “on the nose,” to apply one of the most overused phrases in criticism. What this argument ignores is that American pop culture – and particularly American cinematic pop culture — is far more conservative in 2023 than it was in 1999. A film that ends with the demolition of the world’s credit card companies not only would cut more against the grain now, it likely wouldn’t even be made — certainly not by a major studio like 20th Century Fox, and probably not even by Netflix. And not because Fight Club is too “on the nose,” but because it’s actually way more subversive than the kinds of movies that we see now. We have not evolved “past” this movie. We have devolved from it.

A better criticism is that Fight Club is unnecessary as a movie because we are already overrun by Tyler Durden-esque blowhards on social media. That is undeniably true. But none of those people are as sexy as Brad Pitt, or as witty or stylish as David Fincher.

3. Gone Girl (2014)

Fight Club flopped at the box office because few people beyond Fincher, Pitt, and Edward Norton understood that it was a comedy. And this movie scored at the box office because few people beyond Fincher and his collaborators understood that it was a comedy. Audiences thought they were getting a drama about a woman getting revenge on her boorish husband, and Gone Girl presents a convincing-enough facsimile of that kind of movie to satisfy those demands. But the meat of the movie are the acidic takes on marriage, the media, and the bullshittery that men and women must indulge in to fit in socially. It’s a facsimile of a Lifetime movie that is really about the facsimiles we all invent just to get through life.

Stanley Kubrick is frequently cited as a point of comparison for Fincher. But Kubrick was always drawn to big subjects: war, outer space, man’s violent nature, Jack Nicholson’s forehead. He didn’t have the appetite for pulp that Fincher does. But if there is one Fincher film I suspect that Kubrick would have loved, it’s Gone Girl. It’s David Fincher’s Eyes Wide Shut. A marriage movie that’s skeptical about whether it’s possible (or wise) to reveal yourself to another person, even one who ostensibly loves and “knows” you better than anybody. Only Fincher also gives the audience the satisfaction of seeing a beautiful half-naked woman slit Neil Patrick Harris’ throat.

2. Zodiac (2007)

With the exception of his Netflix movies, which had limited theatrical runs, this is his worst-grossing film. But it’s also the movie that’s now regarded as the de-facto masterpiece in his oeuvre. It’s a weird duality for this artful populist, who was rightfully proud of what he accomplished and also emboldened after Zodiac‘s poor box office to venture into television because he believed that audiences no longer wanted to see through snail-paced 157-minute movies. Here’s a thought experiment: What if Zodiac made $300 million? Does Fincher still decide to do House Of Cards? If he doesn’t do House Of Cards, how does that affect the trajectory of Netflix? Does this shift mean that Fincher decides to keep on making low-key epics for the big screen? Is the entire course of modern cinema forever altered?

Maybe? Probably not? I have no idea. What I know for sure is that the more passionate you are about David Fincher, the more passionate you are about Zodiac. At the risk of bringing up the “a-word” again, this is the movie that best spotlights all of the things that people love about his movies. If you treasure graphic murders rendered in gorgeously desaturated greens and yellows, mismatched buddy teams with understated comic chemistry, and uncertain denouements that send you stumbling out of the theater in pained ecstasy, then Zodiac is the best possible version of that kind of film.

1. The Social Network (2010)

David Fincher wants you to know that he is not an auteur, and my favorite Fincher film (unlike Zodiac) is certainly not an auteurist statement. Aaron Sorkin’s script is rightly considered a modern landmark. So is the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Jesse Eisenberg’s performance as Mark Zuckerberg is one of the great film characters of the last 20 years, and Andrew Garfield’s Eduardo Saverin is not far behind. Everybody involved in The Social Network is working at the top of their games. But this is still David Fincher’s film. Only he could have made a movie about people sitting in rooms at computers feel as exciting and upsetting as Seven or Fight Club. It’s the David Fincher movie I’m always most excited about rewatching, and the one I find most difficult to stop watching once it’s on. Where do you stop? After the Facemash sequence? After the Winklevii meet with the Harvard dean? After Zuckerberg’s first meeting with Sean Parker? After his second meeting with Parker? Surely not before Eduardo says “you better lawyer up, asshole”? Of all Fincher’s movies, The Social Network is the one that belongs with all those golden-era warhorses he put on the list of his favorite films. It’s his All The President’s Men or Chinatown, a culture-defining work that chips away at our perceptions of the contemporary world while also entertaining millions of people. It’s where Fincher chases perfection and finally catches it.

There’s a lot to be excited about now that the actors’ strike (along with the writers’ strike) has come to an end. One of the first blockbuster projects on that list would be Deadpool 3, which is already thrilling enough of a prospect because the Merc With A Mouth not only nailed his first two feature films but could pull the MCU out of its current standstill. As well, Hugh Jackman has been eating so much food to bulk back up again for Wolverine. And hey, The Crown‘s Emma Corrin will show us her villainous side, too.

Zero complaints there. When will the threequel come out, though? Currently, the film has not moved (unlike Venom 3, which pushed back from summer to November 2024) from its projected May 3, 2024 release date. This could still happen, perhaps to push back to a mid-summer release, and Deadline has details on how the Ryan Reynolds-led film’s production is about to come roaring back, fast. Granted, the movie is only 50% complete at this point, but let’s stay optimistic here:

Deadline hears that those movies set to go back this week or in very near future are Marvel Studios/Disney’s Deadpool 3 starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman and directed by Shawn Levy (50% complete); Paramount’s Gladiator 2 over in Europe, Warner Bros’ Tim Burton directed Beetlejuice 2 (which only has two days left), Clint Eastwood’s Juror No. 2 (which has around a dozen days left) and Sony’s Venom 3.

Again, the R-rated Deadpool is still considered to be on track for May until we hear otherwise. Katanas crossed.

(Via Deadline)

With the SAG-AFTRA strike finally reaching a tentative agreement, actors can now return to work as the studios scramble to salvage both this year’s TV season and the Summer 2024 theatrical slate. While platforms like Netflix aren’t under the same crunch, the streaming giant is eager to get its heaviest hitter up and running. Namely, Stranger Things 5.

According to Deadline, the fifth and final season of the wildly popular supernatural series was just about to start filming before the writers strike started. That threw production into limbo, and the SAG-AFTRA strike arriving a few weeks later did not help matters. However, both strikes are now (tentatively) resolved, and Deadline reports that Netflix is aggressively making moves to get Stranger Things 5 filming in “a couple of weeks.”

However, Stranger Things executive producer Shawn Levy will have his hands full. Before the strikes hit, he was halfway through directing Deadpool 3, which brings Ryan Reynolds Merc with a Mouth and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine into the MCU. Marvel is also very eager to get that film back and up running for a 2024 release.

As for what fans can expect from Stranger Things 5, obviously, plot details are being kept tightly under wraps. The kids will no doubt have their hands full with Vecna rupturing the veil between the Upside Down and the town of Hawkins, but outside of that, it’s a mystery where the story will head next. Although, David Harbour did reveal before the SAG-AFTRA strike that the final season will be “very, very moving.”

“I’m excited to go back. I’m excited to wrap it up in a bold, amazing way,” Harbour told Variety. “I’m excited to really swing with this character, because you know they’re going to pay off these OG characters: Eleven, Hopper, Joyce, Will, Mike. They’re going to pay them off in big ways because they’ve lived with you for the past eight years.”

(Via Deadline)

Beyoncé is always one step ahead. International tickets for her Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé theatrical release are set to go on sale today, November 9, and she commenced the sale by releasing a brand-new worldwide trailer.

In the 98-second clip, the all-time-winningest artist at the Grammys describes how she stays winning, narrating “Welcome To The Renaissance” from her Renaissance World Tour, “I close my eyes and travel through realms of space and time. Reality holds no power or control of my state of mind on my voyage to find a source to charge my inner being. Assembly line frequency as I tap my MPC.”

Then, Beyoncé speaks more directly about the challenges she’s faced, saying, “In this world that is very male-dominated, I’ve had to be really tough. To balance motherhood and being on this stage, it just reminds me of who I really am.”

Presented by Parkwood Entertainment and AMC Entertainment, Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé is due in theaters on December 1. On October 26, The Hollywood Reporter exclusively reported that Beyoncé will hold the world premiere in London on November 30 and the US premiere on November 25 in Los Angeles.

“Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé accentuates the journey of Renaissance World Tour, from its inception, to the opening in Stockholm, Sweden, to the finale in Kansas City, Missouri,” reads the trailer’s official description. “It is about Beyoncé’s intention, hard work, involvement in every aspect of the production, her creative mind and purpose to create her legacy, and master her craft. Received with extraordinary acclaim, Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour created a sanctuary for freedom, and shared joy, for more than 2.7 million fans.”

Watch the worldwide trailer above.

Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé is in theaters 12/1. Find more information here.