One word: whoa!

Rating: 9/10 (5 March 2007)

I was a class-room clown, in grammar school, when most of the events, in this highly suspenseful true story, took place. So, all I knew about the Zodiac Killer, before getting into see this movie, was that he had never officially been caught.
And, now I know why.
The first-third of the movie is undeniably the creepiest, as the actual murders occur, and you hear voiced over recordings of the killer anonymously phoning the cops to virtually brag about it!
That's also where you're introduced to Robert Downey, Jr. as a cynical, semi-alcoholic, and apparently gay crime reporter; Jake Gyllenhaal as an editorial cartoonist with an obsessive-compulsive penchant for puzzles and cryptographs; and Mark Ruffalo as the SFPD detective who ultimately--and unfairly--bears the lion's share of responsibility for never bringing in the killer.
How the murders, and the mocking letters that gradually outnumber them, affect each of the above-mentioned characters is what makes the final third of the movie less (inevitably) boring than the middle third. Gyllenhaal, especially, makes you want to scream out loud, at the movie screen: "Get a life, you idiot! You're wife is right!"
Some of you are probably asking yourselves, right now, why I don't give this a perfect ten, if I liked it so much. Simple: the semi-fictionalized murder scene at the lake. The disclaimer at the start of the film said that the whole thing was based on actual case files. But, if neither the man nor the woman--so brutally stabbed at the lake--survived, how did Robert Graysmith get that part about the Zodiac Killer claiming to have escaped from a prison in Montana?