OWEN'S BESTS
10. Zodiac
Drawn, with meticulous precision, from the actual case files, and shot under dank fluorescence, David Fincher's raptly unsettling docudrama about the hunt for the San Francisco serial killer is a journalistic procedural mystery in the tradition of All the President's Men. Yet it's also an investigation into the obsessive addiction of mystery itself. The killer creates a reign of terror metaphorically evocative of the one we're in now, and as the case gets bounced from one precinct to the next, finally landing in the hands of a cartoonist and amateur sleuth (Jake Gyllenhaal, in an underrated performance), we're trapped in his desire to look the monster in the face — and, more impossibly, to make the monsters go away.

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