9. Zodiac (2007)
Anyone with a passing interest in true crime is familiar with the Zodiac Killer, who terrorized San Francisco with a string of still-unsolved murders in the 1960s. But David Fincher’s chilling masterpiece is less about the slayings – though he re-enacts several of them in unnerving detail – than the rabbit hole the killer opened up with the maddening puzzles and coded messages he disseminated through the press. The case fully consumed political cartoonist Robert Graysmith, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, whose decades-long obsession with uncovering the Zodiac’s identity cost him his marriage Given how, every few years, some new theory arises about who committed the killings, he’s clearly far from the only one.
