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...Embodying some of the worst tendencies of the Hollywood of this era, this nonsense nonetheless serves to cloak the rest of the film in the familiar, so we might more readily digest its experimental features: rapid shifts in film stock; associative cutting across time and space, fiction and documentary, truth and speculation; and, of course, its brazenly provocative content, going so far as to accuse Lyndon Johnson of conspiring to murder his predecessor.

Though JFK has been rightfully scrutinized since its release over the relative accuracy of its historical account, key to its persuasively expressed thesis is the idea that in a functioning democracy, healthy suspicion toward government infrastructure and the narratives espoused by powerful interests are vital even if the struggles do not finally amount to legislative action.

What I now consider to be to be among the greatest American studio movies made in my lifetime hit me slowly, feeding my head with its heavy doses of paranoia, conspiracy, and exquisite film craft... The resulting tapestry of footage, for which Bob Richardson won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography, is a Dantean layering of consciousness, shuffling together waking dreams, nightmare, and memory in its strange, fading processes.

JFK is a deeply confused movie, but there's a searching quality to the confusion that marks it as a genuine work of art. Here is where Stone — the onetime all-American boy whose eyes were opened by Vietnam, the fire-breathing right-winger who became a committed lefty — lays bare his contradictions. He's the knowing cynic who still wants to buy into the idea of America.

[JFK] can't be demerited for offering a simple, staid history lesson. Quite the opposite, as Stone's movie assures that no representation of the largest truths (i.e. the Warren Commission) will ever actually embody such lofty veracity (i.e. Stone casting Garrison himself in a cameo appearance as Earl Warren). That's why it's both paradoxical and somehow perfect that the movie's reckless blitzkrieg of infotainment is so hypnotically engrossing as to be totally duplicitous.

This is potent filmmaking, and few Hollywood blockbusters of the past 20 years are even fit to challenge JFK in terms of art, drama, and sheer entertainment. But film is also a medium of trickery, and Stone is well aware. JFK is a smoke and mirrors act, albeit a brilliant one, that seamlessly blends documentary footage and re-creations, scripts the film from Garrison's subjective position to exclude alternate views and build composite characters.

What we are left with is the impression of reality as a grim, deterministic struggle between various forces competing to wield the most compelling, most seductive narrative for us to accept. In the middle of this is Stone's cinema, carrying the viewer aloft in its sheer force, disorienting in its persuasiveness, persuasive in its disorientation. Not unlike the authoritarian forces against which Stone wages movie warfare, instead of speaking truth to power, JFK speaks cinematic power to truth.

The investigation conducted between '66 and '69 by DA Jim Garrison (whitewashed as Costner) allows Stone to proffer a dazzling array of facts, hypotheses and flashbacks, intercutting archive footage, reconstructions, and more conventional dramatic material. While his logic is often murky, the data overload is forceful, if not wholly persuasive. Though the huge cast performs strongly, characterisation is minimal, and the overall structure uninspiring.

As someone who doesn't believe much of the Warren Report, I'm favorably disposed toward any movie that seriously questions it, but Stone's all-purpose conspiracy theory, built like a house of cards, rivals Mississippi Burning in its sheer crudeness and contempt for the audience.