Notes on…

JFK(1991)

Dir. Directed by Oliver Stone


In its way, JFK may be the most perceptive—and revealing—movie ever made about the office of the presidency, with Stone showing that policy and politics are always subordinate to the cult of personality. The title character is a structuring absence whose flaws and humanity get posthumously disappeared in the transition to a symbol of lost innocence. JFK is an incoherent and historically insupportable movie, but on some deep, synaptic level, it’s phenomenally apt, and its blurring of fact and fiction on a molecular-technological level—not just in the script but in its endlessly manipulated images—made it one of the signal works of the decade […].

Adam Nayman (The Ringer)

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Follows the investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy led by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison.