One of the finest mystery-thrillers you're ever going to come across, David Fincher's Zodiac is a masterwork of meticulous research, painstaking craftsmanship & precision detailing which approaches the police-procedural sub-genre in an incredibly authentic manner, plus the level of accuracy it manages to maintain with the real-life investigative process turns it into an instant classic right away.

The story of Zodiac focuses on the manhunt for the notorious serial killer whose killing spree occurred around the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960s to early 1970s & who used the alias "Zodiac" in his letters to newspapers, which also included ciphers. The film covers the life of investigators & reporters who become obsessed with the case in their search for the murderer.…

100/100

Paranoia thrives in the dewy mist of San Francisco while Evil wanders loose, and although Zodiac crafts traditional scares and deliberate suspense around its massive runtime, Fincher's masterpiece sends chills down the spine because it's true. David Fincher shoves the viewer into a maze with several beginnings and no ends, and the mystery arrives like a mailbox after a month of vacation.

Fincher has always had a knack for artificiality within intensely human stories, but in Zodiac, every character feels like a personal construct that lives outside the frame. Every actor takes their particular material and crafts something even more glorious out of already wondrous writing. As a result, the world of Zodiac has an immaculate contrast between sympathetic…

This movie's good and all, but I can't help but think that it's largely composed of things that had already been done before, and done better. "Hurdy Gurdy Man" used to creepy effect as the theme for a predator hunting for prey in a vintage car is straight out of L.I.E.. Spike Lee did the "couple in a car being gunned down to a pop song" thing better in Summer of Sam. JFK was a better sprawling, star-studded epic about a criminal investigation based on a first-person true crime book by an obsessive investigator with a nagging wife who wishes he would spend more time with the family (and Chloe Sevigny is not the actress or the screen presence that…

A gloomy, industrialised San Francisco harbours the mysteries of an unspeakable villain; obsession. Fincher's Zodiac dives into the tormented lifestyles of three distinctly different men, allied briefly by their infatuation with solving a cryptic murder case.

As a promising series of ciphers lead characters and viewers alike through a labyrinth of clues as the prospect of a satisfying outcome slowly diminishes, Fincher explores the bustling heart of America's fascination with the widespread circulation of news. The Zodiac killer, however, has no interest in feeding any more than just enough information to keep a detective, a cartoonist and a journalist from abandoning hope, sending them deep into compulsive addiction with discovering his true identity. If nothing else, Zodiac is a harrowing…