All Charlie Shackleton had to do was give the Sundance Film Festival a 90-second video introducing himself and his documentary Zodiac Killer Project, which premiered at the festival on Monday. Instead,

Watch enough true-crime documentaries and patterns begin to emerge—a situation that speaks to the genre’s embrace of a cookie-cutter formula defined by a host of recurring narrative and formal tropes.

Director Charlie Shackleton's meta project about the notorious serial killer challenges, with wry humor, our entire approach to true crime.

Starting off with a Netflix film, The Tinder Swindler covers the horrors a group of women endured after using the world’s most popular dating app, Tinder. The true story sees a seemingly charming and super-rich man make women fall in love with him. However, this is all a mask for him to con them out of enormous sums of money.

Charlie Shackleton’s quasi-true crime documentary 'Zodiac Killer Project' is a fascinating approach to form but a tepid experience overall.

The Zodiac Killer Project by Charlie Shackleton masterfully exposes the tricks and tropes of true crime. It just debuted at Sundance.