“The first, flat-out great film of 2007, David Fincher‘s spine-tingling Zodiac is a 158-minute, decades-spanning movie about one of America’s most notorious serial killers,” writes Boston Herald critic James Verniere. “This is the GoodFellas of psycho-killer thrillers.

“A remarkably accomplished, measured and mature procedural, Zodiacis to Se7en — Fincher’s 1995 breakthrough effort — what the real-life case is to Dirty Harry, Don Siegel‘s great, lurid 1971 classic, featuring a Zodiac-like killer played by Andy Robinson.

“In many ways, Zodiac is Se7en stripped of its exploitation trappings, creepy credit sequence and twist ending and transformed into a great American crime epic.

“Fans of Se7en and Fight Club may be befuddled by this somber, ambiguous work. Zodiac unfolds in a creepy, real retro-world, where jurisdictional anomalies and bad record-keeping make life miserable for the good guys. The film is a tale set in an Analog Age when crime detection is the stuff of shoe leather, ink, paper and pastel-blue, rotary dial phones.

“The truth is out there, all right, and it will kill you.”