The Social Network Review

The film opens with a bar conversation that moves faster than most thrillers' chase scenes, and it sets the terms: Aaron Sorkin's script is the engine, an overlapping, interrupting, footnote-dense stream that Jesse Eisenberg delivers as if breathing were an inefficiency. Fincher shoots it with the coverage discipline of a procedural, cutting between two depositions and the past so every triumph arrives pre-soured by the lawsuit it caused. Jeff Cronenweth lights Harvard in sodium orange and underwater green, and the Henley regatta sequence, shot with tilt-shift lenses so the rowers look like toys, is the film's cruelest joke about class.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross turn keystrokes into dread. Andrew Garfield's Eduardo carries the wound, and Armie Hammer's doubled Winklevoss twins land more comedy than they should. What keeps it from the very top is a coldness by design: the film diagnoses its subject brilliantly but declines to feel much about him, and the women exist mostly as provocations. Still, line for line, nothing else that decade is written this well.