The Social Network: Critic Reviews

The Social Network has everything you want in a thriller for the brain: huge doses of ego and duplicity, corporate backstabbing, and some very layered performances.

Mr. Fincher and Mr. Sorkin offer up a creation story for the digital age and something of a morality tale, one driven by desire, marked by triumph, tainted by betrayal and inspired by the new gospel: the geek shall inherit the earth.

It zips along, told mostly in flashback, and communicates the pure exhilaration of this momentous social gear-change with aplomb.

Brilliantly directed by David Fincher, this provocative film probes the impetus for invention, the changing face of social interaction and the limits of friendship -- the old-fashioned kind and the version linking 500 million Facebook users.

What looks on paper like a static series of dead-end conversations comes to life as a vital, engaging, even urgent parable for our age.

On the level of craft, the movie's just absurdly enjoyable.

The Social Network succeeds, per journalism's most basic directive, in showing not telling. And like great journalism, a great film can capture the reality of the present -- and even make art out of it.

The Social Network's first act is its best -- a hellishly precise youth movie rattling along on a clamor of computer jargon.

Weeks after seeing it, moments from it will haunt you.

This account of Facebook's founder, and of the website's explosive growth, quickly lifts you to a state of exhilaration, and pretty much keeps you there for two hours.

Somehow the results come together like the perfect status update.

The Social Network shares creative DNA with a handful of classic, zeitgeist-savvy films like Network and All the President's Men, as well as more recent fare such as The Insider and Michael Clayton.

The film swaggers with a bravado born of insecurity...

The movie's lustrous, deep-focus frames and headlong pace are difficult to resist. Its an entertainingly cynical small movie.

Rushes through a coruscating series of exhilarations and desolations, triumphs and betrayals, and ends with what feels like darkness closing in on an isolated soul.

David Fincher's film has the rare quality of being not only as smart as its brilliant hero, but in the same way. It is cocksure, impatient, cold, exciting and instinctively perceptive.

An unlikely marriage of directorial and writerly sensibilities has produced one of the most stimulating films of the year.

Watching The Social Network, the real Zuckerberg may feel as if someone has hacked into his Facebook account and changed his profile picture.

It's astonishing that a movie mostly set in front of computer screens and in deposition rooms, a movie where the end is already known, has the hold of a suspense film.

Fincher gives the story the vitality and clear, coherent tension of a thriller.

There's a cool precision and honesty to The Social Network, the story of the founding of Facebook, which guarantees its entertainment value even as it limits its emotional impact.

With The Social Network, director David Fincher has come up with a movie that, in telling the turbulent story of whiz-kid Mark Zuckerberg's creation of Facebook, isn't just compelling. It's great.

The Social Network combines a multitude of impressions and conflicting first-person accounts in a trajectory that is refreshingly coherent.

Continues Fincher's fascinating transition from genre filmmaker extraordinaire to indelible chronicler of our times.

It's the finest film in many years to open the New York Film Festival.