5. Fight Club - (1999, David Fincher)
Fincher's output of films over the past decade or so has been mostly well received with films like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) and The Social Network (2010), but it was his film Fight Club which truly found a place among the classics. Like many reviewers at the time of release, I originally had quite a tepid reaction to the film. It was only after my girlfriend who had spent some time examining the movie in her Film Studies class explained the subtler aspects of the film to me that I was able to see past Fight Club's brutal, off-putting exterior. Critics of the 90s had a similar issue to the film, as Gary Crowdus explains in his summary of the film's critical history:
They felt the graphic scenes of fisticuffs served only as a mindless glamorization of brutality, a morally irresponsible portrayal, which they feared might encourage impressionable young male viewers to set up their own real-life fight clubs in order to beat each other senseless."
The 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre allowed the film to transcend its critics to truly become a modern classic. The end of the film depicts the total destruction of New York's financial district, in a sequence astoundingly similar to the real-life events which would follow 2 years later on September 11th. Those who had attacked the film couldn't hide from the truth that the world we inhabit is an unforgiving, violent place and that criticising Fincher's choice to depict violence was to criticise his right to show truth.