Director David Fincher’s 2007 thriller excavates a notorious series of real unsolved murders that petrified the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s. Jake Gyllenhaal portrays Robert Graysmith, a cartoonist whose amateur investigation into the serial killer, known only as Zodiac, complements the efforts of SFPD inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.).

Fincher’s dense narrative offers various interpretations of the crimes and Zodiac’s identity, avoiding the cliché channelings typical of crime thrillers. An original poster from the film is on view in the current exhibition Director’s Inspiration: Bong Joon Ho.

John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, 1962) directed this epic international thriller based on the debut novel by Thomas Harris, creator of Hannibal Lecter. Robert Shaw, in a rare and welcome heroic leading role, is a world-weary Mossad agent on the trail of a Black September terrorist (Marthe Keller) and her unstable partner (Bruce Dern) planning an unthinkable crime on US soil.

John Williams’s score adds to the pulse-pounding excitement, and the screenplay by Ernest Lehman, Kenneth Ross, and Ivan Moffat gives the characters on both sides of the conflict their due.

A London psychiatrist (Robert Newton, Around the World in 80 Days, 1956) smuggles acid from work daily to a blitzed building, with the aim of killing and dissolving the body of his wife’s American lover (Phil Brown, best known as Uncle Owen in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, 1977). Featuring a stirring score by Italian composer Nino Rota (The Godfather, 1972), this slow-burn relationship drama turns into a thrilling game of cat-and-mouse once Scotland Yard sets its sights on the missing American. Feverishly directed by blacklisted, Oscar-nominated Edward Dmytryk (Crossfire, 1947), this story is truly where Kafka meets film noir.