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Zodiac
Some murders just won't lie down and die. The man who called himself Zodiac is officially linked to five killings, though in letters to the press he claimed as many as 37. For several years from 1969 he terrorized the San Francisco area, taunting the authorities with frequent cryptic messages that received front-page treatment. Despite this weakness for self-publicity, and despite failing to finish off two of his victims, who were able to describe their ordeal in some detail, the Zodiac continued to elude the police, and eventually the trail went cold. A fictionalised version of Zodiac emerged in the Hollywood movie Dirty Harry in 1971, under the alias Scorpio - the punk Clint Eastwood blows away at the end. Zodiac himself seems to have been a bit of a movie nut - there is evidence that he took inspiration from the 1932 movie The Most Dangerous Game (which is man). And Detective Dave Toschi, the prime investigator on the case, was famous for having shown Steve McQueen the ropes when they made Bullitt. There have been a couple of low budget exploitation efforts, but mostly the movies have shied away from this case, presumably because it's so complex and open ended. It makes sense that the notoriously fastidious David Fincher should take up this challenge - Zodiac is his kind of psychopath. Seven imagined an insolently cerebral serial killer outsmarting the cops to the very end. Both The Game and Fight Club are constructed as puzzles; they're morbid jokes at our expense. And in the five years since Panic Room he came closest to committing to The Black Dahlia, another real life unsolved murder mystery. Even the relatively anonymous Panic Room seems to have appealed to him as a technical challenge, a trick to be worked out. Much less in-your-face than Fincher's previous movies, this is a long, meticulous film (2 hrs 36 minutes - cut down from a four hour first cut, DVD fans!) and Fincher lays out every facet of the case in methodical detail, beginning with the second (or is it the third?) crime scene, July 4, 1969, and then rifling through the weeks, months and years - all of it scrupulously fact-checked. In the past Fincher has poured on the atmospherics and ramped up the shock value, but his work here speaks of the utmost concentration, patience and restraint. It is easily his most mature and coherent picture. 
Shot in High Definition by DP Harris Savides (Elephant), Zodiac is both matter of fact and strangely elusive. For all that much of it takes place under fluorescent office lights, cutting between parallel investigations led by Inspectors Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) and crime beat reporter Paul Avery (an engagingly dissolute Robert Downey Jr), the prevailing mood is an altogether hazier, amber nocturne, the darkness on the edge of town - and the edge of reason too. Toschi is listed among the movie�s credited consultants along with several witnesses, experts, and private detectives. But Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt take their cue from two true-crime books by Robert Graysmith (played here by Jake Gyllenhaal), a former cartoonist on the San Francisco Chronicle and a friend of Avery's who becomes obsessed with the case. While Toschi, Armstrong and Avery are overwhelmed and ultimately defeated by its myriad imponderables, Graysmith can't let go. Eventually he zeroes in on a prime suspect, convicted pedophile Arthur Lee Allen (now deceased). In reality, Graysmith and Detective Toschi are both convinced Allen is their guy, and the film comes close to endorsing that opinion - only to throw further doubt on the fire at the fade out. I bet Fincher would have loved to have solved this crime for himself, but in the end he couldn't ignore the fact that no hard evidence definitively proved Allen's guilt, and it's pretty clear that the obsessive Graysmith abandoned his objectivity years ago - maybe around the time his wife left him in disgust. 
Zodiac is a fascinating procedural precisely because Fincher leaves room for doubt. He's at least as interested in how not knowing drives and cripples these men as he is in establishing definitive guilt. You come away from the movie semi-convinced that Arthur Lee Allen got away with murder, but with the gnawing feeling that no jury would have been able to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt. Tom Charity 
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