Holy FUCK that was long!
The question is...did it need to be so long?
If you ask me, no.
Was it worth it?
If you ask me, definitely not.

This film is almost 3 1/2 hours and in those 3 hours, I never cared what was going on. Maybe it's because I went over the Kennedy assassination in many, many times in history classes throughout the years and I knew that the popular opinion of who did it was Lee Harvey Oswald, but I don't think that's it. Even if you know how a film is going to end, a film can still have the power to pull in you in and it never truly pulled me in. It was…

Film #12 of the June Challenge

"So, what really happened that day?"

Oliver Stone's JFK is an enthralling and eye-opening film, expertly executed and surprisingly relevant to today's government.

The film is a barrage of facts, and theories about the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, as discovered by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner). Yet, for all the facts it presents, and it's 3.5 hour runtime, it's extremely interesting and entertaining. Oliver Stone presents Garrison's discoveries is such a way where you believe his theory is true. We're discovering things we didn't know about the assassination, and this sense of discovery is one of the film's best assets.

Kevin Costner is at the top of his game, as…

Say what you will about the facts presented in this film, you'll be hard pressed to argue about the way Oliver Stone presents them. For a movie that essentially just throws facts at you for 3.5 hours, it is remarkable how entertaining it actually is. Stone's direction and the editing are so wonderfully on-point that the film becomes a marvel and one of the best films of the 1990s no matter where you think it falls on the believability scale.
I personally come away from the film without a shred of doubt that a conspiracy took place to murder our 35th president. Now whether this conspiracy actually included LBJ or other high-ranking members of our government is pure speculation that…

Now I don't profess any great love for Oliver Stone. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say I really don't care for the large majority of his films (last one seen: South of the Border, though Savages is on my list). But JFK is, for some reason, a film that I've become slightly obsessed with of late and could happily watch it again and again and again. I first encountered the film in the early 90s at about the age of 13 when I overheard two young classmates asking our history teacher if he could lend them the Warren report (true story). And for the times I've seen the film since then, I've enjoyed it purely as…

I'm not really one to believe in conspiracies; I believe Neil Armstrong did walk on the moon, those planes did hit the towers, and Sam Worthington did sell his soul (and his personality) to the devil in order to make it in Hollywood. I do, however, find conspiracy theories absolutely fascinating and since this was around 3.5 hours of conspiracy up on screen, it was pretty easy to get wrapped up in Garrison's world of multiple shooters and CIA cover-ups.

Probably the most amazing thing about this film is the pacing. It never really slows down over the entire 3.5 hours and works extremely well as a procedural. It took a while to believe all of the accents on display,…

Oliver Stone's 'JFK' is a great film, but not quite the five-star triumph I was hoping it would be. The ambition of the project and the painstaking detail put into it is admirable and the amount of information that is dropped throughout the film is astounding. It deserved its editing win, as it is truly a marvel- integrating newsreel footage, tense sequences of dialogue and black and white recreations seamlessly and smoothly. The direction is terrific and the ensemble is right on point.

Despite my praises, though, there are reservations.

First of all, through much of the film's first half, I got to wondering: Why didn't Stone just make a documentary out of this material? The film is done with…

Film #12 of the June Challenge

"So, what really happened that day?"

Oliver Stone's JFK is an enthralling and eye-opening film, expertly executed and surprisingly relevant to today's government.

The film is a barrage of facts, and theories about the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, as discovered by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner). Yet, for all the facts it presents, and it's 3.5 hour runtime, it's extremely interesting and entertaining. Oliver Stone presents Garrison's discoveries is such a way where you believe his theory is true. We're discovering things we didn't know about the assassination, and this sense of discovery is one of the film's best assets.

Kevin Costner is at the top of his game, as…

It was 1993 or 94 when I first saw Oliver Stone's JFK, from a VHS rental store, and I have to say I was unimpressed. It was too complicated and fast paced for my liking, so I put it to bed for about 3 years. I then picked up the VHS collectors edition for around £5 and settled down to re-assess the movie. I was hooked after 10 mins. The story and characters seemed to mesh, the editing was pitch perfect, the cinematography shone, and the performances were outstanding. After viewing the movie I was 100% convinced of a conspiracy and set about reading and researching myself, all the theories and the backstory. it was only with the advent of…

1) The grade is arbitrary, as I'm conflicted over how it's just wrong wrong wrong — and I haven't even read Gerald Posner's Case Closed — and how thrilling the filmmaking is. It's seductive and easy to get lost in Oliver Stone and Jim Garrison's hot house of batshit insanity. There are moments here and there when Garrison doubts whether he and his team have simply disappeared up a collective ass, and stray pieces of dialogue where someone points out that maybe habitual liars and obvious crazies might not be trustworthy. But the special genius of the film is that it buys these factually handicapped assertions hook, line and sinker. It's not a critique of gullibility, it's an embodiment of…

There are huge stretches of this movie that are just absolutely mesmerizing once it gets going (the obvious standouts being Donald Sutherland's character and the final courtroom speech). The scenes which just bombard you with a flurry of out-there speculation or other crazy shit (e.g. Joe Pesci flashbacks) are so much fun, and the editing is phenomenal. The main problem, and what stops this from getting 5 stars, is that those scenes don't really start until an hour into the movie -- until then it's a standard and kind of boring (if not for the subject matter) procedural, so the extra two hours afterwards make the movie feel about a half hour too long. And the family scenes that are…