A great crime puzzle...and one of Fincher's best films

Rating: 7/10 (5 November 2015)

Director David Fincher meticulously mounts this impeccably cast true-life crime-thriller concerning a serial killer self-nicknamed "The Zodiac" who terrorized Northern California from the late-1960s to the mid-1970s...and was never apprehended. Jake Gyllenhaal is solid portraying Robert Graysmith, a divorced dad with two kids working at the San Francisco Chronicle; employed as the paper's resident cartoonist, Graysmith became completely absorbed by the newspaper's reporting of (and the police department's concurrent investigation into) a series of grisly murders happening in and around the Bay Area. The film, based on Graysmith's non-fiction book, is intense and unsettling, though it does pack reams of detail and criminal minutiae into its running time--most of which dead-ends or winds up discarded. Excellent performances from Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards as the two principle police inspectors on the case, also John Carroll Lynch as a factory worker and potential suspect. Not for every taste; however, as a portrait of hard-working people obsessed with solving a baffling case that dragged on for decades, quite riveting. *** from ****