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9 Films and 2 TV Shows to Watch if You Like David Fincher’s ‘Zodiac’

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9 Films and 2 TV Shows to Watch if You Like David Fincher’s ‘Zodiac’

It takes a very special person to direct a film. But for a director to reach auteur status, they must display a deeply rooted obsession with film. The word auteur brings many great filmmakers to mind, such as Quentin Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick, and Alfred Hitchcock, but no auteur captures the theme of obsession on film better than David Fincher.

Fincher’s 2007 sleeper hit Zodiac, which follows a cartoonist’s spiraling descent into obsession after the newspaper he works for receives a cipher from the most notoriously elusive serial killer of the 20th century, epitomizes obsession in both the film’s theme and Fincher’s attention to detail. The film is a thrilling mystery/police procedural that grabs the audience from the opening scene and never lets go; even the film’s slower moments have you sitting on the edge of your seat. With every viewing there is something new to discover within the film, making it easy to become obsessed with rewatching it and finding new clues along the way. In cases like this though, it is important to recognize when to take a break and come back with fresh eyes. But don’t worry, this list contains nine films and two shows for obsessive fans to watch in between viewings of Zodiac.

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Se7en

This list wouldn’t be complete without containing at least one of David Fincher’s other films and Se7en seems to be the most fitting. Se7en follows a soon-to-be-retired homicide detective and his naive replacement as they hunt for a serial killer who murders based on the seven deadly sins. Se7en is a much darker and grittier film, but Fincher’s attention to detail is still apparent making it a complimentary feature to Zodiac.

Memories of Murder

Between the late 1980’s and early 1990’s South Korea had its own serial killer, and similar to the Zodiac Killer, the killer was never caught. Bong Joon-Ho’s Memories of Murder tells the story with such prowess and care as it follows detectives Park Doo-man, Cho Yong-koo, and Seo Tae-yoon on their desperate search for a serial killer. Fincher and Joon-Ho both have a distinct style. While both films share similar stories, they each are told from unique perspectives by two of the greatest directors of the last two decades.


M

Fritz Lang’s 1931 cinematic masterpiece M, which follows a morally-divided city that must come together in order to catch a child abductor, has had an enormous influence on crime thrillers over the past ninety years. Watching M and Zodiac as a double feature would make for a great history lesson as to the evolution of the crime-thriller genre.

Prisoners

Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners flexes an all-star cast including Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Viola Davis to tell a story about a father who pushes his moral limits in order to capture the person who kidnapped his daughter. Although Prisoners’ story pushes the line of morality with more aggression, both Prisoners and Zodiac show how far people are willing to go in search of the truth.

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Silence of the Lambs

Heralded as one of the greatest horror films of all time, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs follows a female FBI agent who is assigned to interview an extremely clever and manipulative cannibalistic serial killer with hopes he will have insights on a serial killer who is currently at large. Anthony Hopkins gave arguably his most iconic performance in Silence of the Lambs as the cannibalistic psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter (not to mention Ted Levine’s disturbing performance as Buffalo Bill). Zodiac also boasts its own creepy performance thanks to the great character actor John Carroll Lynch, who steals the few scenes he is in as Arthur Leigh Allen.

RELATED: Netflix Film Chief Teases David Fincher’s ‘The Killer’ as “Provocative”

The Vanishing

George Sluizer’s The Vanishing is a Dutch film that takes everything about the thriller genre and flips it on its head as it follows a man searching to find his girlfriend, who disappeared from a rest area three years earlier. It is best to go into this film cold and let the story play out before you. Like Zodiac, the ending of this film will stick with you long after the credits roll.

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Nightcrawler

Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler dons yet another great performance by Gyllenhaal as Lou Bloom, a sociopath with a drive to become the top stringer in Los Angeles by any means necessary. While Zodiac takes place when California was coming off the high of being the epicenter of 1960’s counterculture, Nightcrawler drops the viewer into the seedy underground nightlife of modern Los Angeles.


Blow Out

Brian DePalma’s unique directing style is in full swing in his 1981 classic Blow Out, which follows a sound effects technician who accidentally captures an assasination while recording sounds for a horror film. It is safe to say that both DePalma and Fincher are true masters of the filmmaking craft, and it is fascinating to see how each directs scenes of suspense.

The Zodiac Killer

Tom Hanson, who owned a chain of pizza restaurants, produced and directed a film titled The Zodiac Killer as an attempt to lure out and capture the real-life Zodiac Killer in 1971. Although the film is far from being considered a cinematic masterpiece, it is a bizarre little film that has a unique piece of Zodiac history behind it. The film also makes for a great watch with a group of friends.

Mindhunter

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Based on the book Mindhunter: Inside The FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker, the Netflix original series Mindhunter takes a dark dive into the FBI’s early days of criminal psychology and criminal profiling. Mindhunter gives the audience a fascinating look inside the minds of infamous serial killers and the dangers of what one might find. Fincher is an executive producer for the show and also directs a few of the episodes.

The Most Dangerous Animal of All

In 2014, Gary L. Stewart published a book titled The Most Dangerous Animal Of All: Searching For My Father And Finding The Zodiac Killer, where he claimed that his father, who abandoned him, was the Zodiac Killer. FX released a documentary on the book titled The Most Dangerous Animal of All which not only follows Stewart’s journey for the truth, but also the aftermath of the book’s publication. This is a modern look at one’s obsession with the Zodiac case and how it is still able to drag people down the dark and twisted rabbit hole over half a century after the Zodiac’s first killing.


The list of films and shows for Zodiac lovers to watch could go on for a very long time, but the films and shows on this list are the essential ones to start with. They are not only entertaining, but rich with history and film knowledge. Plus, they may give obsessed fans new perspectives for which to view Zodiac on their umpteenth viewing.


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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

Hitting the three-quarter-century mark usually means a retirement home, a nursing facility, or if you’re lucky to be blessed with relatively good health and savings to match, living in a gated community in Arizona or Florida.

For Sylvester Stallone, however, it means something else entirely: starring in the first superhero-centered film of his decades-long career in the much-delayed Samaritan. Unfortunately for Stallone and the audience on the other side of the screen, the derivative, turgid, forgettable results won’t get mentioned in a career retrospective, let alone among the ever-expanding list of must-see entries in a genre already well past its peak.

For Stallone, however, it’s better late than never when it involves the superhero genre. Maybe in getting a taste of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) with his walk-on role in the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel several years ago, Stallone thought anything Marvel can do, I can do even better (or just as good in the nebulous definition of the word).

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The property Stallone and his team found for him, Samaritan, a little-known graphic novel released by a small, almost negligible, publisher, certainly takes advantage of Stallone’s brute-force physicality and his often underrated talent for near-monosyllabic brooding (e.g., the Rambo series), but too often gives him to little do or say as the lone super-powered survivor, the so-called “Samaritan” of the title, of a lifelong rivalry with his brother, “Nemesis.” Two brothers entered a fire-ravaged building and while both were presumed dead, one brother did survive (Stallone’s Joe Smith, a garbageman by day, an appliance repairman by night).

In the Granite City of screenwriter Bragi F. Schut (Escape Room, Season of the Witch), the United States, and presumably the rest of the world, teeters on economic and political collapse, with a recession spiraling into a depression, steady gigs difficult, if not impossible, to obtain, and the city’s neighborhoods rocked by crime and violence. No one’s safe, not even 13-year-old Sam (Javon Walker), Joe’s neighbor.

When he’s not dodging bullies connected to a gang, he’s falling under the undue influence of Cyrus (Pilou Asbæk), a low-rent gang leader with an outsized ego and the conviction that he and only he can take on Nemesis’s mantle and along with that mantle, a hammer “forged in hate,” to orchestrate a Bane-like plan to plunge the city into chaos and become a wealthy power-broker in the process.

Schut’s woefully underwritten script takes a clumsy, haphazard approach to world-building, relying on a two-minute animated sequence to open Samaritan while a naive, worshipful Sam narrates Samaritan and Nemesis’s supposedly tragic, Cain and Abel-inspired backstory. Schut and director Julius Avery (Overlord) clumsily attempt to contrast Sam’s childish belief in messiah-like, superheroic saviors stepping in to save humanity from itself and its own worst excesses, but following that path leads to authoritarianism and fascism (ideas better, more thoroughly explored in Watchmen and The Boys).

While Sam continues to think otherwise, Stallone’s superhero, 25 years past his last, fatal encounter with his presumably deceased brother, obviously believes superheroes are the problem and not the solution (a somewhat reasonable position), but as Samaritan tracks Joe and Sam’s friendship, Sam giving Joe the son he never had, Joe giving Sam the father he lost to street violence well before the film’s opening scene, it gets closer and closer to embracing, if not outright endorsing Sam’s power fantasies, right through a literally and figuratively explosive ending. Might, as always, wins regardless of how righteous or justified the underlying action.

It’s what superhero audiences want, apparently, and what Samaritan uncritically delivers via a woefully under-rendered finale involving not just unconvincing CGI fire effects, but a videogame cut-scene quality Stallone in a late-film flashback sequence that’s meant to be subversively revelatory, but will instead lead to unintentional laughter for anyone who’s managed to sit the entirety of Samaritan’s one-hour and 40-minute running time.

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Samaritan is now streaming worldwide on Prime Video.

Samaritan

Cast
  • Sylvester Stallone
  • Javon ‘Wanna’ Walton
  • Pilou Asbæk

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Matt Shakman Is In Talks To Direct ‘Fantastic Four’

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According to a new report, Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct the upcoming MCU project, Fantastic Four. Marvel Studios has been very hush-hush regarding Fantastic Four to the point where no official announcements have been made other than the film’s release date. No casting news or literally anything other than rumors has been released regarding the project. We know that Fantastic Four is slated for release on November 8th, 2024, and will be a part of Marvel’s Phase 6. There are also rumors that the cast of the new Fantastic Four will be announced at the D23 Expo on September 9th.

Fantastic Four is still over two years from release, and we assume we will hear more news about the project in the coming months. However, the idea of the Fantastic Four has already been introduced into the MCU. John Krasinski played Reed Richards aka Mr. Fantastic in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The cameo was a huge deal for fans who have been waiting a long time for the Fantastic Four to enter the MCU. When Disney acquired Twenty Century Fox in 2019 we assumed that the Fox Marvel characters would eventually make their way into the MCU. It’s been 3 years and we already have had an X-Men and Fantastic Four cameo – even if they were from another universe.

Deadline is reporting that Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct Fantastic Four. Shakman served as the director for Wandavision and has had an extensive career. He directed two episodes of Game of Thrones and an episode of The Boys, and he had a long stint on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There is nothing official yet, but Deadline’s sources say that Shakman is currently in talks for the job and things are headed in the right direction.

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To be honest, I was a bit more excited when Jon Watts was set to direct. I’m sure Shakman is a good director, but Watts proved he could handle a tentpole superhero film with Spider-Man: Homecoming. Wandavision was good, but Watts’ style would have been perfect for Fantastic Four. The film is probably one of the most anticipated films in Marvel’s upcoming slate films and they need to find the best person they can to direct. Is that Matt Shakman? It could be, but whoever takes the job must realize that Marvel has a lot riding on this movie. The other Fantastic Four films were awful and fans deserve better. Hopefully, Marvel knocks it out of the park as they usually do. You can see for yourself when Fantastic Four hits theaters on November 8th, 2024.

Film Synopsis: One of Marvel’s most iconic families makes it to the big screen: the Fantastic Four.

Source: Deadline

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Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase Star in ‘Zombie Town’ Mystery Teen Romancer (Exclusive)

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Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase have entered Zombie Town, a mystery teen romancer based on author R.L. Stine’s book of the same name.

The indie, now shooting in Ontario, also stars Henry Czerny and co-teen leads Marlon Kazadi and Madi Monroe. The ensemble cast includes Scott Thompson and Bruce McCulloch of the Canadian comedy show Kids in the Hall.

Canadian animator Peter Lepeniotis will direct Zombie Town. Stine’s kid’s book sees a quiet town upended when 12-year-old Mike and his friend, Karen, see a horror movie called Zombie Town and unexpectedly see the title characters leap off the screen and chase them through the theater.

Zombie Town will premiere in U.S. theaters before streaming on Hulu and then ABC Australia in 2023.

“We are delighted to bring the pages of R.L. Stine’s Zombie Town to the screen and equally thrilled to be working with such an exceptional cast and crew on this production. A three-time Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award winner with book sales of over $500 million, R.L. Stine has a phenomenal track record of crafting stories that engage and entertain audiences,” John Gillespie, Trimuse Entertainment founder and executive producer, said in a statement.

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Executive producers are Trimuse Entertainment, Toonz Media Group, Lookout Entertainment, Viva Pictures and Sons of Anarchy actor Kim Coates.  

Paco Alvarez and Mark Holdom of Trimuse negotiated the deal to acquire the rights to Stine’s Zombie Town book.

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