When Seven, with its velvety world of bottomless evil, taps you on the shoulder, your instinct will be to dive under the theater seat.

Full Review | Mar 29, 2024

I wouldn't go so far as to call David Fincher's Seven the most terrifying film ever, but it's right up there on the top shelf with Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Mar 29, 2024

Seven doesn't take you to hell and back; it takes you to hell and keeps you there, looking around and wondering how it had come to this.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Mar 29, 2024

There is no denying that Seven is a deeply unpleasant movie. But I believe it is a fine one, too. It doesn't glory in its depravity, but keeps a distance from it.

Full Review | Mar 29, 2024

All the literary allusions and cinema school self-consciousness can't save Fincher from drowning in the tawdry waste of this dreadful, brutal, abusive movie. Go, our little moviemaker, and sin no more.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 29, 2024

The performance that eventually emerges from the shadows gives both Anthony Hopkins and Anthony Perkins a run for their money. By the end of the film you'll run to your car and lock the doors.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 29, 2024

There's a great deal of talent on display in the serial-killer thriller Seven, which only makes it worse when you finally recognize this is a heartless, soulless, pointless exercise in audience manipulation.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 29, 2024

The results of the killings are needlessly grotesque and don't really serve the smart screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker and the artful direction of David Fincher. All of this talent is worth seeing if you can look past the gruesome details.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 29, 2024

Seven, a dark, grisly, horrifying and intelligent thriller, may be too disturbing for many people, I imagine, although if you can bear to watch it, you will see filmmaking of a high order.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 29, 2024

A spectacular piece of cinema -- a vision of evil triumphant, distilled into deadly psychic poison by a world that is itself corrupt and fallen. After Alien 3, Fincher shows himself a real artist of the medium.

Full Review | Mar 29, 2024

I do not expect to see many better pictures in 1996... Seven is a dazzling movie and it engages the mind while jabbing the solar plexus.

Full Review | Mar 29, 2024

It's a case where a traditional but nicely twisted plot is married smartly to MTV visuals, to the uncommon advantage of them both.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 29, 2024

Fincher's one previous film, Alien 3, shared the same dingy colours and downbeat mood. But where that film stumbled over its tedious plot, Seven almost dances with vitality.

Full Review | Mar 29, 2024

Seven is gripping and intricate in a sordid way, and Freeman and Pitt, physical and spiritual opposites, become an oddly satisfying pair, but I was happy when the movie had played its last trick on me and could hold me no longer.

Full Review | Mar 29, 2024

Did anyone else believe that MTV-video veteran David Fincher ruined his feature film career when it started?... Apparently not the honchos at New Line Cinema, who handed Fincher an interesting, grisly idea for a movie, then allowed him to bury it.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Mar 29, 2024

Each actor reaches deep and brings forth a character far greater than the one written; for all its disappointments, the film can pierce the heart. As for Fincher, he pierces the heart with genius.

Full Review | Mar 29, 2024

A murky, sometimes disturbing rehash of The Silence of the Lambs genre whose studied obscurity, formulaic thrills, and mannered disgust don't quite conceal its loose ends and predictable plot twists.

Full Review | Mar 29, 2024

It's a scary piece of work.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 29, 2024

A director who seems to feel undisguised Envy for The Silence of the Lambs, but will end up inspiring Wrath through overblown Pride in his own intrusive touch.

Full Review | Mar 29, 2024

Fincher's suffocatingly dark style is the perfect fit for Seven: The gloomy, nightmarish images communicate a fear that the characters' dialogue cannot, and if Seven haunts your dreams, it's thanks to Fincher's post-modern eye.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 29, 2024