Fincher's home-run; a touch of "All The President's Men" and classic Lumet '70s flix; one of the year's best & the first must-see of '07!

Rating: 10/10 (5 March 2007)

ZODIAC (2007) **** Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards, Robert Downey, Jr., Brian Cox, John Carroll Lynch, Chloe Sevigny, John Getz, Candy Clark, Elias Koteas, Donal Logue, Ciara Hughes, Pell James, Patrick Scott Lewis, June Raphael, Philip Baker Hall, Tom Verica, Zach Grenier, Adam Goldberg, James LeGros, Charles Fleischer, Clea DuVall, Paul Schulze. Filmmaker David Fincher hits a home run in this absorbing, unsettling true-life account of the infamous Zodiac killings in the San Francisco Bay area that haunted California, and in particular its law enforcement, for literally decades. A stellar ensemble with strong performances by Ruffalo and Edwards as homicide inspectors David Toschi and William Armstrong, respectively; Downey as crime reporter of the San Francisco Chronicle, Paul Avery; and especially Gyllenhaal as the newspaper's political cartoonist Robert Graysmith (whose books the excellent adaptation by James Vanderbilt are based on), who doggedly became mired in his own investigation, obsessed with the cryptic cipher who kept a manhunt at bay for so many years of frustration, personal lives shattered and literally thousands of hours of speculation and innuendo. Fincher dials back on the waycool camera trickery and instead wisely focuses on the policier at hand with expert precision and a dynamite '70s feel décor thanks to production designer Donald Graham Burt, dank cinematography by Harris Savides, art director Keith P.Cunningham, costumes by Casey Storm, David Shire's musical score and razor-sharp editing by Kirk Baxter & Angus Wall. The film hearkens back to classic Lumet and '70s suspense as well as "All The President's Men" meat-and-potatoes investigative journalism. Finally the first great film must-see of the year.