Any students and/or devotees of the true-crime spree rampant in our modern storytelling will find Zodiac Killer Project a must-see.

| Mar 9, 2025

 …a deconstruction of true crime… [that] comes around to arriving at some of the same kind of epiphanies that that material, in its best form, often arrives at.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 3, 2025

It’s a full-frontal assault on a way-too-popular genre, done with a trickster’s deft touch.

| Feb 28, 2025

Shackleton's narration is wry and astute but also wistful; he's self-aware enough to know he's drawn to this stuff just like so many of us, even as he understands its limitations and drawbacks.

| Feb 28, 2025

The non-film that Shackleton has rescued from the jaws of erasure is almost certainly more rewarding than the one he was originally hoping to make.

| Original Score: B | Feb 28, 2025

Zodiac Killer Project, for example, wittily deconstructs the true-crime genre through Charlie Shackleton’s aborted attempt to make such a documentary...

| Feb 8, 2025

The film shifts into being a work of criticism in its own right by becoming something of a video essay where we see just how much of the sludge of shallow true crime content falls back on the same old tricks.

| Jan 31, 2025

Charlie Shackleton gets at the heart of what makes these docs so successful on both a psychological and schematic level. He deconstructs the genre but also manages to deepen it.

| Jan 31, 2025

Zodiac Killer Project is a wicked embodiment of Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the media itself being the message.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 31, 2025

It’s a brave, fascinating piece of filmmaking that asks viewers to question the mysteries of true crime storytelling and how they’re being told.

| Jan 31, 2025

Eviscerates with wit and onscreen receipts the conventions of the true-crime genre that have been hammered into cliché over the past decades.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 31, 2025

A work of criticism as well as a work of art, it’s a sharp takedown of our culture’s obsession with true crime, identifying and skewering the genre’s most familiar tropes even as it playfully indulges in them.

| Jan 30, 2025

If Laurence Sterne made a true-crime documentary it might resemble this exasperating, sometimes negligible but also often amusing and rather insightful personal work from British film-maker Charlie Shackleton.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 28, 2025

Speaking to viewers who are cognizant of what films can and cannot be made, “Zodiac Killer Project” is a biting statement on how many artists have been funneled into a creative dead-end by a trend-chasing market.

| Jan 28, 2025

The result is even better than his initial design: a sharp, hilarious, self-aware, and acutely insightful work of both celebration and critique.

| Jan 28, 2025

While there is gentle mockery in Shackleton’s examination of the filmmaking techniques, what’s crucial to the film’s tonal success is that he is a fan and aficionado of the genre.

| Jan 28, 2025