Akira Kurosawa

Like Hitchcock, Akira had a style that was prevalent throughout his films. His movies all seemed to have a lessen to be gotten out of them. He also kept using the same actors over and over again. Many of his earlier films while before WW2 were fairly different from his later ones after the American occupation. He switched from making the empire look good to displaying a more analytic point of view of human nature. The later movies all seemed to show how the human condition could be very corrupt and how a true hero would be a person to stand up against that corruption even in the face of many trials. He puts in remnants of classic Japanese theater in his movies as well as the use of weather to dramatize scenes. His use of weather, though creative, can be somewhat overdone in some scenes. In many of his films the sky seems to end up being a focus and depending on the mood of the story the colors of the sky are different.

Zodiac

Zodiac has a lot of twists in it and definitely keeps the viewer guessing. The movie starts out, out of the blue. It then leads into a very twisted story of a killer who keeps sending the papers encrypted letters to post and then be solved by the public. Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) as the main character is definitely not the person you would suspect for trying to solve a murder mystery. He is the San Fransisco Chronicle's cartoonist. He then meats up with a police detective and starts one of strangest obsessions of his life. He only finds the killer decades later after the case had been cold for years.
True to the rest of his movies David Fincher did most of the movie with very low lighting. At least in this movie it may have had the purpose of increasing the suspense. He also is very good at making the movie very unpredictable and makes numerous plot twists. All in all this movie was another very good piece of art and it is very much a David Fincher movie.

Alfred Hitchcock

All his movies had very blatant similarities that tied them to each other. That being said they were not necessarily good things. Alfred tended to have very strange men that do not mind their own business. The women tend to always, at least by the end of the movie, want to appease the men for god knows what reason.

His sound usage is interesting even if his characters are just plain creepy. He cuts out sound entirely for some of his scenes and it adds a level of...suspense almost. The lack of sound makes you pay more attention to what is being shown directly in the center of the screen and less on the surrounding parts of the screen.

These to things being said I think Hitchcock is overrated as a director. His overall special effects are corny for the eras they were created in and his characters are strange. The only redeeming factor was his sound usage.