How Long to Watch “JFK”?

Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman and Jack Lemmon star in Oliver Stone's conspiracy thriller, which masqueraded as historical document but proved gripping enough to scoop two Oscars (photography and editing) and be nominated for a further six. Stone approaches his exploration of one of the most famous assassinations in history via the investigations of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison. Like many in America and around the world, Garrison felt the official investigation into the killing of John F Kennedy in Dallas, 1963, was far too cursory, and he set out to reconstruct the day's events via every piece of information he could lay his hands on. His conclusions included the now long-established idea that Lee Harvey Oswald couldn't have worked alone. Stone drags a wide range of other suspects into the supposed cover-up, including Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Mafia and J Edgar Hoover, and uses archive footage to bolster his various claims (though, interestingly, he's not entirely sold on all of Garrison's theories). Leaving the rights and wrongs of Stone's interpretation of history aside, the director delivers a compellingly paranoid thriller that fairly fizzes along and whose cast is studded with the likes of Sissy Spacek, Joe Pesci, Tommy Lee Jones, Walter Matthau, Kevin Bacon, John Candy and Donald Sutherland.