David Fincher’s subversive comedy-drama Fight Club turns 25 this year. Its blackly comic exploration of toxic masculinity, released when Andrew Tate was still an impressionable 12-year-old, continues to divide opinion. It was gloriously misunderstood upon its initial release in the United States in October 1999 — Roger Ebert wrote of Fight Club that it was “the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish, a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.” He was on firmer ground with the film’s homoeroticism, saying “It’s macho porn — the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights.” But to read his review is to see a great, usually incisive critic missing the point entirely.

Yet even Ebert had to concede that “it is very well made and has a great first act.” For the uninitiated, the film begins in the style of Woody Allen on Quaaludes. The nihilistic, jaded, and anonymous narrator (Edward Norton) has taken to attending support groups for terminal illness and addiction for entertainment, the darker the better. He then falls under the charismatic tutelage of soap salesman Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), to the confused disbelief of his fellow misery tourist Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter, cast gloriously against type), who rails against the way in which men of their generation have been castrated by society and technology alike. The solution? Create an underground fight club in which men can batter each other stupid in the name of unleashing their inner beast.