Zodiac: Critic Reviews

Zodiac leaves us haunted by the knowledge that he's looking for something that can't be found: a way to make the monsters go away.

David Fincher's magnificently obsessive new film Zodiac is part police procedural, part monster movie, a funereal entertainment that is a testament to this cinematic savant's gifts.

It is impossible not to enjoy Zodiac: if enjoy is the word for a picture so often scary and stomach-turning.

With its unhurried pace and cerebrally engaging plot, Zodiac is an unusually haunting and compelling horror film.

The movie, directed by David Fincher, is not without value, if it's largely without drama.

A long work of completely sustained suspense and dark humor.

This relentlessly swift film super-charges every minute with a maximum of minutiae. Dizzyingly dense, intricate in the extreme, Zodiac is the most information-packed procedural since JFK.

Without a persuasive ending, Zodiac is an exercise in frustration.

Obsession is the real subject here, and obsessing about anything briskly doesn't count. Yet the film also feels self-obsessed, an intriguing drama that slowly devolves into a bleak meditation on the absence of dramatics.

The most perverse thing about Zodiac isn't that its Hollywood's umpteenth serial-killer flick, when such crimes are rare in reality. It's that Zodiac, though based on actual crimes, is one of the dullest of these films to date.

Have no doubts, director David Fincher makes movies that rattle. Even when they're not wholly successful.

I don't think Fincher can relate much to moral outrage. What occupies him is how to send you home antsy, unsure of what you've seen but sure it was worse than you think. He gives you the existential willies.

Any honest neurotic could probably tell you: the emotional payoff of an obsession is not attaining some longed-for goal -- it's the obsession itself, which fulfills certain needs.

What makes Zodiac authentic is the way it avoids chases, shootouts, grandstanding and false climaxes, and just follows the methodical progress of police work.

It's fascinating and unexpected both in its simple, looming images and its storytelling priorities, which may not intersect with the priorities of audiences who couldn't get enough of Se7en.

Fincher does keep this bubbling along, ably assisted by a cast that includes Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Chloe Sevigny, Elias Koteas, and Philip Baker Hall.

Zodiac runs long, about 21/2 hours, but it also runs fast, at a heart-pounding pace over four major characters and 22 years. There's not an ounce of fat on any sequence or performance.

A film that is both emotionally and intellectually unsettling.

The Zodiac killer was never found. Dealing with a murder mystery that's still unsolved gives Fincher shaky enough ground for drama. Add in a protagonist who seems driven by a vacuum, and you pretty much have a movie about nothing going nowhere.

Fincher leads us down little dark alleys and side streets, and we're never quite sure who might jump out to be the killer. After three decades, details of the case have faded from public consciousness, so the movie is surprising at times.

Mr. Fincher's flair for casting is the major asset of his curiously attenuated return to the serial-killer genre.

[A] stark, terrifying and magnificently directed and researched crime thriller.

Conveying an astonishing array of information across a long narrative arc while still maintaining dramatic rhythm and tension, this adaptation of Robert Graysmith's bestseller reps by far director David Fincher's most mature and accomplished work.

David Fincher's sprawling, lavishly produced Zodiac is, in my estimation, more than a good movie.

Zodiac is fascinating and engrossing and realistic and every bit as unsatisfying as real life and real police work often are.