JFK

brendan o'hare4.5

Enough of this Letterboxd bullshit I gotta figure out who killed the goddamn president

SilentDawn5.0

100/100 "It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma! The fuckin' shooters don't even know! Don't you get it?"An addled paranoia epic crossed with a Frank Capra movie; a quest for truth and justice in a disorganized society. Witnesses, testimonials, recreations, and original footage are thrown into a blender, emerging as a historical essay told through feelings and images, bloodcurdling screams and gunshots. I'm in awe of every facet of the production, so much so that even after two viewings in close succession, I believe I still haven't fully taken in its furry of scrambled emotions. JFK has a capacity for hope which probably doesn't even exist anymore, but by the moment in the film where Jim Garrison (tremendously played by Costner) glances into the camera with tears in his eyes, his patriotism and goodwill shines right back at you and it tears into the very depths of your soul. Truly a masterwork of scene construction and editing, performance and a certain kind of intensity that feels sourced in reality. Nothing is left untouched. Names are tossed off, flashbacks start and stop, footage follows its own path to an end point, all in the name of collecting an entire aura of history and evoking it through cinematic technique. It was a stunning step forward for the form, but an even greater leap in regards to how it embodies truthful human values. Breathtaking.

Josh Lewis5.0

STUDY THE PASTBlown away that a movie that cost this much money and with this many huge stars firing on all cylinders (and with hair and accent work this hilarious) was basically "what if Atticus Finch was around to witness MK ultra or Operation Gladio/Mongoose and it caused his brain to leak from his ears?" An experience that Stone and Richardson capture via a masterwork in bombastic, run-on sentence formal construction that merges frantic layers of perspective with breathless, dazzling momentum and a truly disorienting hysteria of information dumps, flashbacks, documents, archival footage, recreations (and fantasy versions of events), aural storytelling monologues from experts and unreliable witnesses in equal measure wrapped together in slo-mo, step-printing, shifting formats, zooms, fancy Steadicam tracking, sweat, etc. This climaxes on almost 30 straight minutes of Costner practically talking to the camera and it's somehow some of the most exhilarating filmmaking of its era. It's history depicted as a psychotic fever dream we'll never truly make sense of (captured in Pesci's delivery of "it’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma"), but we can try. A movie that truly only could've been made by a genius filmmaker and a true paranoid crank who nonetheless was genuinely onto something. And factual or not... look, on the one hand, the procedural skepticism and debunking of the Warren Commission is maybe the most right a Hollywood movie has ever been but on the other, how much gay cabals doing Triumph of the Will nipple-twisting parties were actually involved... Regardless, an intensely exaggerated, rousing "fuck imperialism/intelligence agencies/military-industrial complex" is still probably far more truthful than anything that's ever come out of the CIA.[35mm]Full discussion on ep 264 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.