The Social Network

A founding-of-Facebook drama that plays as a modern Shakespearean tragedy of ambition, The Social Network was met with near-unanimous acclaim as one of its decade's defining films. Critics credit the meeting of a director at the peak of his technical powers with a screenwriter's signature rat-a-tat dialogue, carried by a revelatory central cast: a coiled, socially clumsy lead performance, a genuinely sympathetic turn as the betrayed best friend, and a scene-stealing arrival as a fast-talking tech impresario. The craft is singled out again and again — razor-sharp editing, precise visual control, and a pulsing, minimalist score widely described as essential as the dialogue itself. An opening scene was flagged by many reviewers as an all-time great set piece, and the whole was repeatedly compared to the great rise-and-fall portraits of cinema, with "instant classic" and "decade-defining" recurring verdicts.

The most repeated reservation concerns the screenplay's attitude toward women: the film's female characters are largely thinly drawn — a romantic interest, partygoers, a lone voice of conscience — and reviewers repeatedly called the film out for sidelining and stereotyping them, a complaint its writer has since acknowledged. The script's famous verbal pyrotechnics, in which nearly everyone speaks in the same dazzling register, drew occasional murmurs of excess, and the deposition-framed structure struck a small minority as more device than drama. The film also freely dramatizes real events; critics noted the liberties taken with the historical record, the real Zuckerberg having declined to participate, and some who knew the subjects felt the central portrait was sharpened into something crueler than the man himself.

Beneath the surface, critics found a movie less about technology than about class, status, and the hunger of an outsider at an old institution — a story about winning that looks a lot like losing. Reviewers genuinely split on how to read the protagonist: some saw a damning indictment of a man who turns on everyone who helped him, others a more ambivalent tragedy of someone who cannot connect even as he builds the world's greatest connecting machine. Most disagreements were about tone and sympathy rather than quality, though a small dissenting minority found the whole enterprise emotionally cold and off-putting rather than tragic. The consensus that this is a landmark — and, with hindsight, an increasingly prophetic — work has only hardened with age.