Zodiac

Director: David Fincher

2007 / 157min / 35mm

Described by one viewer, quoted in Nathan Lee’s legendary Village Voice rave, as like “[being] stuck in a filing cabinet for three hours,” Fincher’s obsessively detailed period procedural recounts the facts of the still-unsolved Zodiac killings that shocked the San Francisco Bay area in the late ’60s, and the ongoing efforts of three men—Chronicle employees Robert Graysmith and Paul Avery (Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr.) and SFPD Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo)—to crack the case years after the trail has gone cold. Fincher’s distanced objective mise en scène has never been more perfectly matched to a subject, and the crystalline clarity of cinematographer Harris Savides’s images only serves to intensify the disquieting uncertainty hovering over most everything we see, or think we see, transpiring.

Distributor: Paramount

Part of After the Case