Fight Club

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.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Fight Club -- cue the blurb machine -- is a knockout.

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.

TNT RoughCut Graham Verdon

Frighteningly intelligent and visually stunning film.

Film.com Gemma Files

It always surprises, never bores. It's also just damn good, on every possible level -- so go see it. Now.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

A knockout...So feverish is Fight Club...that thermometer contact might make mercury shatter.

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.

Variety David Rooney

Bold, inventive, sustained adrenaline rush of a movie.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Fight Club's dirty little secret is it's one of the best comedies of the decade.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

It's a genuine shocker - a dazzler of a film - a hellishly funny picture.

San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris

It's the rawest, most hot-blooded, provocatively audacious, dangerous movie to come of out Hollywood this year.

Film.com Robert Horton

Never less than dazzling to look at, and the scorching humor keeps it alive from scene to scene.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

A brilliantly realized series of sucker punches, a philosophical howl disguised as a muscular guy movie.

The New York Times Elvis Mitchell

The sardonic, testosterone-fueled science fiction of Fight Club touches a raw nerve.

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.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

Begins with that invigoratingly nervy and imaginative buzz. But its chic indictment of empty materialist values fizzles.

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.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

It's visually surrealistic, acted with integrity, so brutal in spots that I averted my eyes.

Time Richard Schickel

Both actors are excellent--but there's something conventionally gimmicky about the way it plays its reality/unreality game.

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.

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.

Baltimore Sun Ann Hornaday

Keeps filmgoers wondering what will happen next even as they are repulsed by what's happening in front of them.

USA Today Mike Clark

It's fun to talk about...but the price you pay is enduring its excesses and pummeled-home thematic points.

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.

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.

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.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Grueling and bleak, but not unintelligent...although it's hardly groundbreaking just because everyone's face gets pulpy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

Fight Club is to intelligent men what Catherine Breillat's "Romance" is to intelligent women -- an insult.

Film.com Tom Keogh

This much-anticipated but terribly underwhelming black comedy represents a seriously squandered opportunity.

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.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

If, as Fincher has said, this movie is supposed to be funny, then the joke's on us.