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100Its most impressive accomplishment is to gather a bewildering labyrinth of facts and suspicions over a period of years, and make the journey through this maze frightening and suspenseful.
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75The length and uneven pacing are stumbling blocks with which an audience must contend. Patient viewers will be rewarded; others may wish for something with less subtlety and more verve.
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100Zodiac never veers from its stoically gripping, police-blotter tone, yet it begins to take on the quality of a dream.
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100Fincher gets it all right, and Donovan's hippie-dippy "Hurdy Gurdy Man," which bookends the story, has never sounded so hauntingly menacing.
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88This movie sends you into the night thinking, maybe even a little afraid. Bravo, Mr. Fincher.
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88Unique and unmissable.
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50Never takes off, but it never collapses. At times, it becomes frustrating -- for example, about 30 minutes are spent pursuing a lead that goes nowhere.
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50The film feels self-obsessed, an intriguing drama that slowly devolves into a bleak meditation on the absence of dramatics.
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88This is the rare movie that blends long scenes of meticulous research with a sweeping story and sustains a feeling of riveting suspense. Zodiac grips you by the throat and doesn't let go.
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75Zodiac is a kind of corrective remake of "Se7en," a renunciation of that earlier movie's psychotic nihilism. That rejection extends to a neat sight gag. Fincher gives us a shot of a cardboard cutout for "Dirty Harry" that mocks the personal abyss that catching Zodiac becomes.
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50In some ways, for better and for worse, this is even more about Graysmith (Jake Gyllehaal)--who became obsessed with solving the Zodiac killings that terrorized northern California in the late 60s--than about the murderer.
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75The straightforward approach is crucial, because the movie is constantly doling out so much information -- so many names and places and theories to keep track of -- that it borders on the overwhelming. Occasionally, it's a little dull, too.
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63Without a persuasive ending, Zodiac is an exercise in frustration if not futility. But before it hits the inevitable wall, it does something better than most genre films even attempt: it perfectly depicts the obsession that often overtakes cops and reporters involved in high-profile crimes.
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88Anyone who enjoys the novels of Ed McBain, the Oscar-winning "All the President's Men" or any televised variation of "CSI" will be at home here.
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67At 2 1/2 hours, the film is too long in the telling and too short on suspense.
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83It doesn't break ground like "Seven" or "Fight Club"; it's not a thrill ride like "Panic Room." But it's a mature, thoughtful and full-bodied movie that compensates for the demands it makes with the rewards of craftsmanship, rigor, skill and art.
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91In Zodiac, working from a script by James Vanderbilt, Fincher has decidedly toned down his act. His straight-ahead, methodical direction isn't as flagrantly unsettling as much of his previous work, but it's more psychologically layered. In this film, for the first time, we feel for his characters when they bleed.
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100Zodiac is the rare serial-killer movie in which the psychosis stems as much from the pursuers (and the filmmaker) as the pursued.
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90Conveying an astonishing array of information across a long narrative arc while still maintaining dramatic rhythm and tension, this adaptation of Robert Graysmith's bestseller reps by far director David Fincher's most mature and accomplished work.
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88It's fascinating and unexpected both in its simple, looming images and its storytelling priorities, which may not intersect with the priorities of audiences who couldn't get enough of "Se7en."
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88Zodiac is a reproach both to those dedicated to unscrambling "The Da Vinci Code" and to those hooked on forensic crime shows where all the evidence leads to a tidy conclusion. That Zodiac's manhunt is inconclusive makes it all the more haunting.
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91An absorbing and fulfilling experience -- even though it ends with a question mark.
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75The most provocative aspect of this compulsive riddle is how it resists closure. The end comes not when we have the answer, but when the movie reaches its irresolute end.
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83Like Brian De Palma's 1981 masterpiece "Blow-Out," this movie contains cutting perceptions of obsession, institutional and professional myopia, misplaced loyalty in experts, misreadings of evidence and the kind of confusion that leads to conspiracy theories. But Fincher's movie falls short of masterpiece status.
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50Bits of the picture are fascinating to look at, but eventually, exhaustion kicks in, to the point where we're not sure what we're looking at, or why.
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90Rarely has a film with so much blood on its hands seemed so insistently alive.
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50That's exactly the problem with this movie: It's not about a killer, or his victims, or the manhunt or the cops. They're all in it, of course, more or less. But it's about a writer.
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90Fincher, whose work on "Fight Club" and "Panic Room" displayed his expertise in melding the suspenseful and the lurid, plays it cool here. He lets his stars do their thing.
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70What begins like your basic police procedural becomes more and more choppy and diffuse. To a point, that’s intentional: Zodiac was never caught, and Fincher aims to creep you out with the lack of closure.
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80The movie holds you in its grip from start to finish.
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80Zodiac is superbly made, but it's also a strange piece of work.
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90Firing on all cylinders as a creepy thriller, police procedural and "All the President's Men"-style investigative newsroom drama, the smart, extremely vivid production oozes period authenticity.
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70The picture tries hard for addictive mystery, but it is full of scenes that promise insight and don't deliver.
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90Zodiac may be the perfect meeting of filmmaker and subject -- an obsessive's portrait of obsession that is, finally, a monument to irresolution.
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88It makes for a daringly different kind of thriller -- cerebral, meticulous, haunting.
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80The more unpleasant aspects of the case are minimized in favor of telling the story and highlighting the effects of the case on these four men. It drags in spots, but even if Fincher hasn't hit it out of the park, Zodiac is easily a stand-up triple.
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70Zodiac is primarily a complex character study, despite the film's grim and gruesome subject matter. It's a role reversal of sorts for a director who normally emphasizes the brutal tension in his movies.
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80This gripping character study becomes more agonisingly suspenseful as it gets closer to an answer that can't be confirmed.
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100Zodiac exhausts more than one genre. Termite art par excellence, it burrows for the sake of burrowing, as fascinated by its own nooks and crannies as "Inland Empire."
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80To undertake a thriller of this length and scope with no prospect of a morally satisfying resolution, Fincher must have been a little nuts himself. We'll see whether audiences used to the tidy one-hour cases on "CSI" and "Law & Order" will follow him down Zodiac's murky, twisted, and ultimately dead-end street. It may not sound like it from that description, but it's a hell of a ride.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 85 out of 97
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Mixed: 6 out of 97
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Negative: 6 out of 97
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StevenR.9
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JohnH.0This movie kicks off with a bang and then it is sooooo freeaaaking boring.
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8