REVIEWS : Various links

Robert Ebert  review

Negative review  , focusing on the  use of violence .

" "Fight Club" is a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy--the kind of ride where some people puke and others can't wait to get on again. "

Kenneth Turan : LA Times review

Extremely negative review , focusing on the use of violence and machismo in the film and its lack of intelligence or humanity.

"Fight Club," a film about men who like to fight, is an unsettling experience, but not the way anyone intended. 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. That is a scary notion indeed."


Alexander Walker :  Evening Standard  review

Extremely negative review , accusing the film of supporting fascism na doffending basic human values.

"The movie is not only anti-capitalism but anti-society, and, indeed, anti-God... an inadmissible assault  on personal decency. And on society itself... It uncritically enshrines principles that once underpinned  the politics of fascism, and ultimately sent millions of Jews to the death camps.  It echoes propaganda that gave licence to the brutal activities of the SA and the SS.  It resurrects the Fuhrer principle. It promotes pain and suffering as the virtues of the strongest.  It tramples every democratic decency underfoot... In any well-adjusted society, its stars would feel a backlash of public indignation well beyond the box-office... As for Britain’s own Helena Bonham  Carter, playing a sleazy, white-faced slut, on drugs, suicidal, servicing the flesh and fantasies of both  men, she shows the extent that actresses will go in order to trash their screen images and enjoy notoriety without responsibility. It is not a pretty sight." )

Janet Maslin  New York Times review


Positive review, focusing on its themes of alienation and masculinity in crisis.


"If watched sufficiently mindlessly, it might be mistaken for a dangerous endorsement of totalitarian tactics and super-violent nihilism in an all-out assault on society. But this is a much less gruesome film than ''Seven'' and a notably more serious one. It means to explore the lure of violence in an even more dangerously regimented, dehumanized culture. "

In a film as strange and single-mindedly conceived as ''Eyes Wide Shut,'' Mr. Fincher's angry, diffidently witty ideas about contemporary manhood unfold. As based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk (and deftly written by Jim Uhls), it builds a huge, phantasmagorical structure around the search for lost masculine authority, and attempts to psychoanalyze an entire society in the process. "


Peter Travers - Rolling Stone review

Positive review , focusing on Fincher's  uncompromising and non-judgemental attitudes and the film's intelligence .

"Fincher is a visionary who keeps Fight Club firing on all cylinders, raising hallucinatory hell in ways too satisfying to spoil here. As for the dissenters, "I Am Jack's Complete Lack of Surprise". Fincher's refusal to moralize and reassure has pissed off the watchdogs of virtue. Let 'em bark. They think anything alive is dangerous. Fight Club 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 "

METACRITIC  SUMMARY