Fincher’s powerful ‘Zodiac’
It’s been 10 years since David Fincher made his supreme masterpiece, “Zodiac” — the movie in which his own obsessive perfectionism found an unimprovable choice of subject, style and theme. Adapted by James Vanderbilt from Robert Graysmith’s authoritative account of the killings that rocked the Bay Area in the 1960s, the film is a procedural and a panorama, a movie less about the brutality of mass murder than it is about the horror of not knowing — of becoming addicted to your life’s work and then seeing that work drain away before your eyes.
Superbly acted by Mark Ruffalo, Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr. as a detective, a political cartoonist and a reporter, respectively, who found themselves sucked into the Zodiac killer’s self-mythologizing vortex, and brilliantly shot on HD by the late, great Harris Savides, “Zodiac,” like all of Fincher’s best work, demands the wide-awake attention that only a theater can provide.