"What David Fincher has accomplished is to remind the audience why serial-killers scare us so deeply – it's that they can exist in the real world, that they creep among us and could strike at any moment. [...] The acting across the board is terrific – faithful to the period without sinking into kitsch, restrained without being intentionally dull or "lifelike," and in the case of Jake Gyllenhaal, a real show of range that may even outdo his "Brokeback Mountain" performance.
Gwyneth Paltrow in New Line Cinema's Seven - 1995
I never liked "Seven" because I thought Fincher spent too much time glorifying the sleazy world he'd conjured up, but this movie feels like a rethinking of an earlier film as dramatic as the later violence-is-bad Eastwood movies. (Tellingly, there are very few showy shots in the entire film.) I can always do without scenes of a beleaguered wife whining to her hard-working husband, but there's no question the movie agrees with her. Fincher is as obsessed as his characters are about the crime –the laying-out of the case is fascinatingly detailed but still riveting – but he's smart enough not to fall apart with them. This is a 159-minute treatise on the futility of obsession that never takes it easy on its characters – even when Gyllenhaal’s Robert Graysmith finally gets his wish to “uncover” the truth about the killer at the end of the film, he realizes how empty a dream it really was. It's absolutely tragic and utterly brilliant. I can't think of a crime drama I've loved so completely." Source: www.Thesimon.com
"Zodiac is a meta-thriller: it comments on itself and other serial killer movies, and in a broader sense, on our obsession with real life and fictional serial killers -" -by Randall A Byrn.
Read the full review Source: http://Blogcritics.org