Simon's Movie Reviews

On paper David Fincher’s Seven (1995) sounds like just about every other serial killer movie that came before. You have the senior detective inching his way towards retirement, the hotheaded rookie, and the killer murdering people in the dark streets of the city according to his own twisted logic. Then the movie gets to THAT ending and the answer to the question: “WHAT’S IN THE BOX!?” Fincher and writer Andrew Kevin Walker could have just made a standard serial killer movie with great performances and dark street corners, but by making that uncompromising conclusion they delivered one of the best films of the 1990s. It is a good thing the movie was made before the rise of social media, because the ending might have been spoiled for many viewers. When I rented the movie in the early 2000s I just knew it was a movie about a maniac who kills people according to the seven deadly sins, I knew nothing about the content of a certain box. Therefore it was a genuine surprise for me to se...

Hundreds of movies have been made about serial killers and the police officers hunting them down, but David Fincher’s “Zodiac” (2007) stands apart because of its more grounded approach. It chronicles a police investigation that begins in San Francisco in 1969 and ends in 1991. Along the way we follow smart police officers who do their best to narrow down a long of list of suspects, and reporters who try to figure out what to do when the killer sends them letters detailing his crimes. These are all intelligent people trying to outsmart a cerebral killer. Yet there is also a surreal sense of humor as the story unfolds. The manhunt and one of its detectives ended up being the inspiration for “Dirty Harry” starring Clint Eastwood. Imagine sitting in a movie theater watching an actor playing that detective who is watching the movie that was inspired by his work. When I first watched that scene and the rest of the movie, it was my first time watching a movie at Toronto’s Scotiabank T...