CRITERION COLLECTION: THE GAME

Enormously wealthy and emotionally remote investment banker Nicholas Van Orton (TRAFFIC'S Michael Douglas) receives a strange gift from his ne'er-do-well younger brother (MILK'S Sean Penn) on his forty-eighth birthday: A voucher for a game that, if he agrees to play it, will change his life. Thus begins a trip down a rabbit hole that is puzzling, terrifying, and exhilarating for Nicholas and viewer alike. This multilayered, noir-ish descent into one man's personal hell is also a surreal, metacinematic journey that, two years after the phenomenon SE7EN, further demonstrated that director David Fincher was one of Hollywood's true contemporary visionaries.