Somehow, David Fincher remains among the most film-geek-venerated of the directors who came up from high-profile music videos, maybe because the best David Fincher movies don’t just wallow in their own expensively, impeccably appointed green-and-brown muck. They harness the filmmaker’s controlling, exacting techniques—stuff that could easily become Poor Man’s Kubrick shtick—in service of movies capable of enveloping the audience, particularly on a big screen. No wonder he’s so successfully embraced digital cinema: He sees the potential to tweak in every pixel. The best David Fincher movies, in other words, reach out of the darkness to burrow under your skin, whether indulging in borderline-phony serial-killer theatrics, chillingly real serial-killer ciphers, or, sometimes, occasionally, no serial killers whatsoever. Not every one is a masterpiece, but none of them could be mistaken for anyone else. Here are all twelve of Fincher’s features, ranked from good to great.

After the high-profile underperformance of Fight Club, Fincher disappeared for a few years and re-emerged with this pure-showoff genre play—and then disappeared again for even longer, so you can guess how that went. Actually, Panic Room is a fine thriller, putting Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart, then a kid well-cast as Foster’s crafty daughter, in the midst of a home invasion. Fincher has a lot of fun reviving the virtual camera he used to zoom into brand-label garbage in Fight Club, here sending it through keyholes and around crevices of the besieged Upper West Side brownstone as an extension of the movie’s surveillance-tech aesthetic. Yet for an exercise in pure suspense (with, yes, a side of parental anxiety and real estate paranoia), the movie goes slack when it pauses to observe the interpersonal dynamics of the home invaders (Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, and Dwight Yoakam, offering…varying degrees of nuance, let’s say). Still, watch it back-to-back with Foster’s thoroughly middling Flightplan to appreciate the Fincher Difference. Fincher also continues his rich tradition of iconic opening credits; Panic Room may not be the first movie to render its opening titles in three dimensions and blend them with their live-action environments, but it’s certainly the first time I remember seeing that, and the practice is forever seared into my brain as “Panic Room-ing.”