Zodiac

David Fincher and serial killers are not two of my film favorites, and yet this movie held my interest throughout its protracted running time (destined to be even longer, and probably better, when the director’s cut comes out next year.) With good characters played by good actors -- led by Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo, along with Robert Downey Jr., Chloe Sevigny, Brian Cox, and a host of familiar faces -- the film offers more than frissons of real-life horror. The sense of period and location is strong -- i.e. San Francisco and other California locales from the late Sixties on -- and so is the subtext of movie history, in this chronicle of the case of the Zodiac killer, who effectively played the newspapers and media to launch a prolonged reign of terror without ever being caught. Gyllenhaal is a newspaper cartoonist and Ruffalo a police detective, who retain the irrepressible urge to solve the case, even after decades, obsessively revisiting the scene of the crime just as the film does. It’s an impressive mix of gruesome thriller, police procedural, and newsroom drama, presented with a realism uncharacteristic of the director or the genre. (2007, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-78.)