Zodiac Grade: A Extras: F

David Fincher is, first and foremost, a director who specializes in manufacturing moods and emotions through visual details. "Zodiac," his best film aside from 1999's "Fight Club," is a crime procedural concerning a true story whose telling has been attempted on film several times before but never so masterfully.\nIt's brave for any filmmaker to take on a true-crime film that audiences know will have no neat and tidy conclusion. The San Francisco-area Zodiac murders of 1968 and 1969 were never solved, and they're presented in harrowing fashion by Fincher, an aesthetic stylist unafraid of employing lingering violence and dread around every metropolitan street corner and in every dank basement. The first hour of "Zodiac" condenses the killer's brief reign over the fears of the Bay area population into some of the year's most vital filmmaking, leading to the final 100 minutes, during which the case tightens, unravels and tightens again, never once becoming tedious or exploitative like so many television and film crime procedurals. \nFincher's cast is almost uniformly superb, headed by Jake Gyllenhaal as Robert Graysmith, an unassuming political cartoonist who becomes so obsessed with solving the Zodiac killings that he loses his wife and writes a best-selling book on the subject (on which this film is based). Robert Downey Jr., excellent as always, embodies the hard-drinking, quick-witted crime beat writer Paul Avery, and Mark Ruffalo offers up a career-best performance as David Toschi, the San Francisco Police Department detective who comes closer than anyone except Graysmith to solving the Zodiac murders. \nThere are no special features on this single-disc edition of "Zodiac" other than a teaser ad for the upcoming expanded edition due out this winter.\nAs a serial detractor of formulaic crime shows such as "C.S.I." and "Law & Order," I was pleasantly surprised by Fincher's adeptness at presenting the minutiae of the Zodiac case in fresh, exciting, terrifying ways. He never allows this particular search for the truth to sag under its own weight, or, by contrast, because of its own effortlessness. "Zodiac" is ominous, elusive and uniquely mysterious, like the killer himself.