Incidentally, it also ended up being a misleading indicator of what was to come for this endlessly curious, genuinely humanist filmmaker. As far as its formal attributes go, not least the peerless editing, JFK is almost untouchable.Ĭalling Pedro Costa’s 1997 film Ossos his most commercial effort may be a stretch, but it was the one that put the Portuguese director on the map, drawing good box office results in his country.

Factually, it’s nonsense, inventing speeches and people to suit the rabbit-hole of its dramatic ends. Aside from Costner’s superb turn as the fraught Garrison, an extraordinary cast includes uniformly exceptional performances, particularly from Jack Lemmon, Tommy Lee Jones, Sissy Spacek, Joe Pesci, John Candy, Gary Oldman (as Lee Harvey Oswald) and, perhaps best of all, Donald Sutherland as government spook ‘X’.

The film’s eight Oscar nominations (yielding two wins for best editing and best cinematography) are perhaps appropriately, given the shadowy nature of the events depicted, only part of the story. Stone’s gripping conspiracy yarn concentrates on New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) and his attempts to unravel the real ‘truth’ of the November 1963 presidential killing. Hollywood’s foremost director of epic political thrillers took on the gig of a lifetime making a film about the assassination of John F.

Ernest and the pale moon monologue