david fincher's ZODIAC (2007)

you'd never guess watching Zodiac that David Fincher hasn't made a film in half a decade; in fact, the enormous maturity of craft on display would suggest that he's spent the interim doing nothing but. he approaches the material with a confidence almost entirely removed from the marvelous (but showy, and distancing) technicality of Fight Club and Panic Room, resulting in a powerful, eminently engaging piece of true-crime police procedural rooted in the experience of three characters, each obsessed to different degrees and ends with deciphering the puzzle of the Zodiac killer. (the grander puzzle, that is; the cyphers are little more than a red herring.) this is an obsession we've seen onscreen before, of course, but Fincher breathes new life into it, even while wrestling with a story that weaves between countless secondary characters and spans more than twenty years. even more impressive is the unlikely coup of making a nearly three-hour serial killer film with maybe five minutes of violence and no resolution into such a pleasant, absorbing work, and here the credit must be spread around from Fincher to his stellar cast and James Vanderbilt's smart screenplay, possibly most notable for it's surprising, winning humor. Zodiac respects its audience to a degree we rarely see in mainstream crime drama, and it's impossible not to return the favor. this is the best film of 2007 so far, and probably won't be topped for months.