The verdict up front: watch The Social Network, and watch it now

Let me save you the suspense. The Social Network is one of the best American films of the century, and if you haven’t seen it, you should fix that this week.

That’s not a lukewarm critic’s shrug. It’s the movie of its generation dressed up as a courtroom deposition about a college website. David Fincher directed it. Aaron Sorkin wrote it. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross scored it. Every one of those choices paid off, and the awards shelf proves it.

Released October 1, 2010, the film tells the origin story of Facebook and the two lawsuits that trailed it. On Metacritic it holds a weighted score of 95 out of 100 from 42 critics, which the site files under “universal acclaim.” On Rotten Tomatoes it sits at 96% from 335 reviews. Those numbers barely move over time, and that stability tells you something.

Here’s the thing people get wrong when they hear “a movie about Facebook.” They picture a dry biopic full of keyboards and hoodies. It isn’t. It’s a story about friendship, betrayal, jealousy, and status, the oldest material there is, told at a blistering conversational pace. Sorkin said it himself: the invention is modern, but the story is as old as storytelling.

If you want a single recommendation for a smart, rewatchable, adult drama, The Social Network is the pick. Now let me show you why it earns that, and who might still bounce off it.

How it actually plays: the structure, the score, and Jesse Eisenberg’s face

The film opens on a breakup. Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) gets dumped by Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) in a Cambridge bar, and the conversation moves so fast it feels like a tennis rally at match point. Fincher shot that scene 99 times. Ninety-nine. You can feel the precision in it.

From there the story splits into two deposition rooms. In one, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) is suing Zuckerberg. In the other, the Winklevoss twins (both played by Armie Hammer, with Josh Pence as the body double) are suing him too. Sorkin built the whole architecture around a real fact: two lawsuits, three conflicting versions of events, all sworn under oath. Rather than pick the “true” one, he dramatized the contradiction itself. That’s the engine of the movie.

What makes it hum:

Roger Ebert gave it four stars and named it the best film of the year. His line stuck with me: “David Fincher’s film has the rare quality of being not only as smart as its brilliant hero, but in the same way. It is cocksure, impatient, cold, exciting and instinctively perceptive.” That’s exactly it. The film mirrors its subject.

Two music cues bookend everything, and neither made the soundtrack album: The White Stripes’ “Ball and Biscuit” opens it, and the Beatles’ “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” plays over the final shot. That last one, laid over Zuckerberg refreshing a friend request page, is one of the great melancholy endings in modern film.

Is The Social Network accurate? The honest answer, and why it doesn’t matter

This is the question that trails the movie everywhere, so let’s deal with it head on. No, The Social Network is not a documentary, and the real people involved have said so repeatedly.

Mark Zuckerberg was not a fan. “I just wished that nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive,” he told Kara Swisher at the D8 conference. He told Oprah Winfrey the drama and partying were mostly fiction, that he’d actually spent six years focused and coding. He also pointed out he was already dating Priscilla Chan at the time, which undercuts the film’s whole “built Facebook to get girls” framing.

Funny detail: Zuckerberg said the wardrobe was dead-on. “Every single shirt and fleece they had in that movie is actually a shirt or fleece that I own.” So they nailed the clothes and fudged the motive.

Co-founder Dustin Moskovitz called it “a dramatization of history” that “emphasizes things that didn’t matter” while leaving out things that did. Eduardo Saverin said it was “clearly intended to be entertainment and not a fact-based documentary.” Sean Parker called his own portrayal “a complete work of fiction” and said he stayed friends with Saverin. Sheryl Sandberg told Arianna Huffington it was “very Hollywood,” adding that in real life Zuckerberg was “just sitting around with his friends in front of his computer, ordering pizza. Who wants to go see that for two hours?”

She has a point. The pizza version doesn’t win Best Adapted Screenplay.

Sorkin never hid the ball. “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling,” he said. “Can we not have the true be the enemy of the good?” Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal framed it fairly for viewers: the film is exhilarating, but “everything that’s seen isn’t necessarily to be believed.”

There were sharper objections worth knowing about. Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig argued in The New Republic that the film missed the real villain, a legal system that let “entitled Harvard undergraduates” extract a huge settlement over hurt feelings rather than any real theft of code or property. Nathan Heller at Slate went further and called the film “rote and deeply mediocre,” objecting in particular to how it framed class and a supposed Jewish underclass at Harvard. Journalist Jeff Jarvis dubbed it “the anti-social movie.” These are real critiques from named voices, and they’re part of an honest picture.

So here’s my take. The accuracy debate is genuinely interesting, and I’d rather you go in knowing the movie takes big liberties. But it doesn’t dent the recommendation. You don’t watch The Social Network to learn how Facebook’s cap table worked. You watch it for what a great drama does: turn messy human motives into something you can’t look away from. The film even flags its own unreliability by building itself out of three contradicting depositions. That’s the honest move baked right into the structure.

Quick reference on where the real players landed:

Was it a hit, and why it plays even better in 2026

Commercially and critically, this one was a clean win, not a flop. On a $40 million budget it grossed $225 million worldwide. It opened at number one and, in its second weekend, dropped only 31.2%, the smallest second-weekend fall for any number-one film of 2010 at the time. Word of mouth carried it.

The hardware backs it up. At the 83rd Academy Awards it took three Oscars: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, and Best Film Editing, out of eight nominations. At the Golden Globes it won four, including Best Motion Picture (Drama) and Best Director for Fincher. The National Board of Review named it the best film of 2010. It swept the “Big Four” critics groups (National Board of Review, National Society of Film Critics, New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association), making it only the third film ever to do so after Schindler’s List and L.A. Confidential.

The reputation has only compounded. In 2024 the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” In June 2025 The New York Times ranked it number 10 on its list of the 100 best movies of the 21st century, and in July 2025 Rolling Stone placed it number 13 on its own century list.

Now the part I find genuinely interesting. The film ages in reverse. When it came out in 2010, Facebook was still a novelty, and Maya Phillips wrote in The New York Times a decade later that at the time the story “seemed overdramatic.” Look at the scale now. Global social media users reached roughly 5.79 billion in 2026 reports, about 69% of the planet, spending somewhere around two and a half hours a day across an average of six to seven platforms per person. Facebook alone sits north of three billion monthly active users.

Fincher’s film caught the queasy feeling of all that before most of us had the words for it. Esquire named it the best film of the 2010s, calling it Citizen Kane “for the Internet age” and praising its “queasy sense of prophecy and prescience.” Polygon called it the best film of the decade. Quentin Tarantino picked it as the decade’s best too, praising Sorkin as “the greatest active dialogist.” That last shot, a lonely billionaire refreshing a page waiting for one person to accept his request, reads very differently once you’ve watched social media become a discovery engine, a commerce channel, and, for some, a genuine threat to a healthy attention span.

There’s more coming, by the way. A standalone sequel titled The Social Reckoning is scheduled for October 9, 2026, with Sorkin writing and directing and Jeremy Strong stepping in as Zuckerberg. Mikey Madison is set to play whistleblower Frances Haugen, with Jeremy Allen White as reporter Jeff Horwitz. Watching the original now is the best possible primer.

Who should watch it, who might skip it, and where to find it

Let me be direct about fit, because the worst thing a review can do is oversell a film to the wrong viewer.

Watch it if you love: dialogue-driven drama, courtroom tension, character studies of difficult people, and films that reward paying close attention. Richard Corliss at Time called it “a high-IQ movie that gives viewers an IQ high.” If that sounds like a compliment to you, you’re the audience.

You might bounce off it if: you want warmth and likable heroes. Nobody here is especially cuddly. Maya Phillips noted in The New York Times that the relationships are “tenuous, superficial bonds” between privileged young men. That coldness is the point, but it’s not for every mood. The dialogue also moves fast enough that half-watching it on your phone will lose you. This is a lean-in movie, not background noise.

A few practical notes. It runs a tight 120 minutes, so it’s an easy weeknight. It’s rated PG-13, which Looper cited when it ranked the film number five on its 2024 list of the best PG-13 movies ever made, so it’s fine for most older teens. It was shot on the Red One digital camera by cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, and it got a 4K Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos upgrade in the Columbia Classics collection, which is the way to see it if you have the setup.

On where to stream: the 2020 New York Times piece noted it was available on Netflix, but streaming rights rotate constantly. Check your current services or a guide like JustWatch before you commit, and rent it digitally if it’s not included anywhere. Don’t take a years-old “it’s on Netflix” line as gospel.

One caveat I’ll repeat because it’s fair: go in knowing the events are dramatized, not reported. Read it as a great story inspired by real people, the way you’d read a historical play. Hold it to that standard and it’s close to flawless. The Harvard Crimson literally gave it five stars and called it exactly that.

If you forget everything else in this review, remember this: The Social Network is a fictionalized drama, and it’s also one of the best films of the century, and both of those things are true at the same time. Watch it for the storytelling, not the fact-checking, and it will hold up better than almost anything else you could queue up tonight.