Metacritic-Rezensionen

With a thieves den of borderline-Shakespearian characters, a wickedly literate screenplay, potent direction by David Fincher, an exceptional ensemble cast and subject matter that speaks to a generation and well beyond, The Social Network is mesmerizing.

Keep your eyes on Garfield - he's shatteringly good, the soul of a film that might otherwise be without one. The Social Network is the movie of the year. But Fincher and Sorkin triumph by taking it further. Lacing their scathing wit with an aching sadness, they define the dark irony of the past decade.

The film comes down to a mesmerizing portrait of a man who in any other age would perhaps be deemed nuts or useless, but in the Internet age has this mental agility to transform an idea into an empire.

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

Quite possibly the first truly great fact-based movie of the 21st century.

It's a grandly entertaining reminder of everything we used to go to the movies for (and still can't get online): sparkling dialogue, thorny situations, soulful performances, and an unusually open-ended and relevant engagement with a major social issue of the day: how we (dis)connect.

Brilliantly entertaining and emotionally wrenching.

The rewards for paying attention are mammoth and exhilarating. This is a high-IQ movie that gives viewers an IQ high.

Fincher and his screenwriter, TV writer-god Aaron Sorkin, have made a seemingly modest picture that achieves something close to greatness the old-fashioned, slow-burning way: By telling a story with faces, dialogue and body language of all types, from awkward to swaggering.

When Mr. Eisenberg makes Mark's face go blank, the character seems scarily emptied out: it's a subtly great, at times unsettling, performance.