His own best character

A MOVIE ABOUT the creation myth of “the world’s greatest movie”, Citizen Kane, a love letter to the form of 1930s movies, and a cynical poison pen letter about Hollywood’s power brokers — David Fincher’s Mank is all of these and more.

Released on Netflix on 4 December, it already leads the streaming giant’s slate of Oscar bids for 2020. It has been trailed as a masterpiece, with myriad claims to Oscar recognition, yet it turns on that most quotidian of Hollywood experiences, the screen credit dispute, the mediation of which was the primary purpose of the Screen Writers Guild, founded in 1933.

Originally a director (1995) and Fight Club (1999), and sealed his reputation with The Social Network (2010), a biopic about the emergence of Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerberg, which garnered an Oscar for screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, though not one for Fincher. Now he has turned his attention to Herman J. Mankiewicz, who alongside its director, Orson Welles, was the screenwriter of Citizen Kane (1941), for many years the choice of most international critics as the greatest film ever made.