Recensioni di Metacritic

The sometimes mesmerizing, sometimes frustrating film proves that Stone, ever the professional provocateur, still has what it takes to rile an audience. Or at least make your head spin round so many times that you’ll be backward thankful for the migraine.

JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass is an exhaustive and sometimes exhausting documentary, a film that can sometimes feel like it’s so packed with information and detail that Stone has lost the path through this dense forest of conspiracy theories. At its best, it reminds one how tightly Stone can assemble a film like this one as he makes a convincing case that some things about the assassination of JFK don’t add up.

Justice hasn't been done. The heavens haven't fallen. But skilfully prodding and probing at the edges of America’s greatest crime scene, Oliver Stone reinforces the argument that this was far from an open-and-shut case.

Stone packs a ton of information in, then lurches to a halt; while he milks Kennedy’s mistrust of the three-letter agencies, his grasp of “what really happened” is still fundamentally guesswork. Still, he does persuade us of smoking guns out there that weren’t Oswald’s, or anywhere near the book depository.

Without the captivating veneer of fiction, Stone’s “JFK Revisted: Through The Looking Glass” comes off as a much more rhetorically dishonest work. And without the brio of Stone’s highbrow-Sam Fuller imperial-phase filmmaking chops, it’s merely a wan appendix.

Did the whole nation and its governing class go into denial after the Kennedy assassination as a way of managing their shock and grief? Perhaps. But this documentary, for all its factual material, is frustrating.

Nobody can doubt the filmmakers’ diligence. The interviewees seem like serious-minded people. But, as has been the case for close to 60 years, we are left with a jumble of loosely connected discrepancies that will do little to persuade those who expect everyday existence to be just that chaotic.