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Fight Club
20th Century Fox
FILM:
BOOKS:
MPAA RATING: R for disturbing and graphic depiction of violent anti-social behavior, sexuality and language
Starring
Brad Pitt,
Edward Norton,
Helena Bonham Carter,
Meat Loaf,
and
Jared Leto
The film's narrator (Norton) attends support groups of all kinds as a way to "experience" something within his unfeeling, commercial existence. On a business trip, he meets Tyler Durden (Pitt) who encourages them to form a fight club as a release for their latent aggressive tendencies.
| GENRE(S): |
Drama
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Chuck Palahniuk (novel)
Jim Uhls
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
David Fincher
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: June 6, 2000
Video: April 25, 2000
Theatrical: October 15, 1999
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
139 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
USA |
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
100
San Francisco Chronicle
Bob Graham
Delivers a sucker punch to the audience and then pulls the rug out from under it. It is sensational. It is also grimly funny.
100
Portland Oregonian
Shawn Levy
Fight Club -- cue the blurb machine -- is a knockout.
100
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
Pulls you in, challenges your prejudices, rocks your world and leaves you laughing in the face of an abyss. It's alive, all right. It's also an uncompromising American classic.
100
TNT RoughCut
Graham Verdon
Frighteningly intelligent and visually stunning film.
100
Film.com
Gemma Files
It always surprises, never bores. It's also just damn good, on every possible level -- so go see it. Now.
100
Philadelphia Inquirer
Carrie Rickey
A knockout...So feverish is Fight Club...that thermometer contact might make mercury shatter.
91
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Paula Nechak
It assaults us with violence, brutality, sexual confusion and anarchy and has enough bruising, punishing humor to keep us laughing with relief.
90
Variety
David Rooney
Bold, inventive, sustained adrenaline rush of a movie.
89
Austin Chronicle
Marc Savlov
Fight Club's dirty little secret is it's one of the best comedies of the decade.
88
Chicago Tribune
Michael Wilmington
It's a genuine shocker - a dazzler of a film - a hellishly funny picture.
88
San Francisco Examiner
Wesley Morris
It's the rawest, most hot-blooded, provocatively audacious, dangerous movie to come of out Hollywood this year.
80
Film.com
Robert Horton
Never less than dazzling to look at, and the scorching humor keeps it alive from scene to scene.
80
TV Guide
Maitland McDonagh
A brilliantly realized series of sucker punches, a philosophical howl disguised as a muscular guy movie.
80
The New York Times
Elvis Mitchell
The sardonic, testosterone-fueled science fiction of Fight Club touches a raw nerve.
75
Miami Herald
Rene Rodriguez
As a piece of storytelling, Fight Club is a bit of a dud: It's a good 15 minutes too long, and the tension doesn't build the way you wish it would.
75
Boston Globe
Jay Carr
Begins with that invigoratingly nervy and imaginative buzz. But its chic indictment of empty materialist values fizzles.
75
New York Post
Lou Lumenick
Fight Club badly wants to be "A Clockwork Orange" for the millennium - and succeeds to a surprising extent until director David Fincher ends up sucker-punching the audience.
75
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
It's visually surrealistic, acted with integrity, so brutal in spots that I averted my eyes.
70
Time
Richard Schickel
Both actors are excellent--but there's something conventionally gimmicky about the way it plays its reality/unreality game.
70
Washington Post
Stephen Hunter
A provocative experience that lights you up even as it brutalizes you. And I don't even like Brad Pitt very much.
66
Mr. Showbiz
Michael Atkinson
Despite terrific comic acting...and an atomic first hour, Fight Club makes a few wrong turns and ends up lost itself.
63
Baltimore Sun
Ann Hornaday
Keeps filmgoers wondering what will happen next even as they are repulsed by what's happening in front of them.
63
USA Today
Mike Clark
It's fun to talk about...but the price you pay is enduring its excesses and pummeled-home thematic points.
60
Newsweek
David Ansen
The most incendiary movie to come out of Hollywood in a long time. It's a mess, but one worth fighting about.
60
LA Weekly
Manohla Dargis
On a purely visual level, it's the most powerful and viscerally exciting movie to come out of Hollywood this year. Which doesn't mean that it's all good.
50
Village Voice
J. Hoberman
This malevolently gleeful satire...is extremely funny, surprisingly well- acted, and boldly designed...at least until its steel-and-chrome soufflé falls apart.
50
New York Daily News
Jami Bernard
Grueling and bleak, but not unintelligent...although it's hardly groundbreaking just because everyone's face gets pulpy.
50
Christian Science Monitor
David Sterritt
Undermines its serious undertones with an avalanche of smirky cynicism designed to flatter the hipper-than-thou fantasies of adolescent moviegoers.
50
Salon.com
Andrew O'Hehir
But imagination and energy are often not enough. On balance, this is the dumbest of the entries in Hollywood's anti-consumerist new wave.
50
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
This exercise in mainstream masochism, macho posturing, and designer-grunge fascism is borderline ridiculous. But it also happens to be David Fincher's richest movie.
50
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
But the second act is pandering and the third is trickery, and whatever Fincher thinks the message is, that's not what most audience members will get.
40
Dallas Observer
Gregory Weinkauf
Fight Club is to intelligent men what Catherine Breillat's "Romance" is to intelligent women -- an insult.
40
Film.com
Tom Keogh
This much-anticipated but terribly underwhelming black comedy represents a seriously squandered opportunity.
30
Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
What's most troubling about this witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence is the increasing realization that it actually thinks it's saying something of significance.
25
Entertainment Weekly
Lisa Schwarzbaum
If, as Fincher has said, this movie is supposed to be funny, then the joke's on us.
 The average user rating for this movie is 9.3 (out of 10) based on 161 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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