3. ‘Zodiac‘ (2007)
“Zodiac” opens with San Francisco, on the Fourth of July, fireworks bursting in the darkness — the City at night in America. Two lovers park, a stranger walks to their car and then comes the fear. And then comes the blood. David Fincher’s most grown-up film, going past the pyrotechnics he’d brought to “Seven” and “Fight Club” and somehow still burning cold and cruel, “Zodiac” tracks the infamous, never-caught “Zodiac” killer who stalked ’70s San Francisco, with cops (Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards), journalists (Robert Downey Jr.) and concerned (perhaps too concerned) citizens (Jake Gyllenhaal) in the frantic, futile hunt. Insidious and intimate, “Zodiac” still spirals out to show all our works (cities, governments, newspapers, families) disrupted, defeated, denied by one madman with the will to kill. It intertwines the police procedural, the newspaper chronicle and the detective story, and pulls those strands tight to choke the climax and closure our movie-taught minds make us expect and our innocent hearts make us hope for. Technically brilliant (Fincher recreates ’70s San Francisco, where he grew up, with subtlety and splendor), “Zodiac” plays like a master class in movie making (the rock ‘n’ roll fervor of Scorsese, the raw-nerve suspense of Hitchcock, the smart cynicism of Pakula) yet is also unmistakably Fincher’s, with its urban claustrophobia and articulate poetry of the unspeakable. Methodical, maddening, blackly humorous and truly terrifying (a scene in which a young couple’s Tab-commercial sunshine rendezvous is cut short by a striding killer horrifies and haunts), “Zodiac” reached back to the past to lay bare the greatest fear of our wounded, wary present moment: The terror of not knowing when the terror will be over.”
– From the Full List at MSN Movies
My Top Ten:
- No Country for Old Men
- Children of Men
- The Wrestler
- Zodiac
- City of God
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Far From Heaven
- The Lives of Others
- The Incredibles
- Brick
