Great Film overall

A Masterpiece!

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Parkland was the name of the hospital that President Kennedy was taken to after being shot in Dallas and Peter Landesman's film deals with the events of that day and the days that followed. It's a somewhat better film than the critics gave it credit for though it doesn't add anything to either the truth or the legend and prefers instead to concentrate on how the assassination affected the people on the ground, the hospital staff, the secret service agents, the Oswald family etc.It's well cast and well played by some very talented players, (Marcia Gay Harden as a nurse, Billy Bob Thornton, Ron Livingston and David Harbour as secret service men, Paul Giametti as Abraham Zapruder, Jackie Weaver and James Badge Dale as Oswald's mother and brother; even Zac Efron as a young doctor who fails to save Kennedy's life is excellent). Landesman shoots it in a semi-documentary style which is fine though perhaps the editing is a little on the busy side; he doesn't seem to like to hold a frame for more than a few seconds at a time. I don't know, of course, how close any of this is to the facts but presumably the film was researched to within a few inches of its life and no matter how often this story has been told on screen it continues to be very moving.

Those who were not born when JFK was assassinated could go through a newspaper's archives to know about now irrelevant details shown in this film to be more enlightened. Although based on a book about a theme on which roughly 600 books have been written, and which raises curiosity and interest internationally even 50 years later, the movie meanders along like an amateur video. Even if the idea was to tell the viewer that Lee Oswald was a nut case, whose mother was no different, why struggle so much? Most people are not bothered, because the majority don't know even that Saddam Hussein's regime had no 'weapons of mass destruction'. At one point it even looked like the movie was a biography about Lee's 'noble brother'. Is this movie about the Oswalds? Is it about doctors attempts to revive Kennedy? Is it to show how the inside of an hospital looked in Dallas in the 1960s? An innocent viewer may end up asking these questions. Those who wanted to make this should have at least got Oliver Stone to their side before attempting a movie to say Oswald had no accomplices. At the end credits it says that it is a 'work of fiction'. Truth prevails, after all

I was very excited when I heard that they were making a movie about Abraham Zapruder and the events that unfolded at the Parkland hospital at the day of JFKs assassination. Unfortunately, the story was poorly told and kind of cobbled together in bits and pieces. Paul Giamatti is often hit and miss for me, but I liked him as the earnest Zapruder, who in real life, DID sell the footage at a low price to a reputable source rather than try to get as much money as possible. had the script focused on telling his story, rather than diluting its subject by adding in the drama at the hospital, this movie could have been made good. The downfall of this movie largely (ironically) the depiction of events at Parkland, the hospital they named the film after. Zac Efron is completely and utterly unbelievable as a doctor at Parkland. this film falls down in its inability to capture any sort of authenticity at the hospital. If you like history and want some authenticity, I would not bother with this film. If you are curious about some of the names such as Zapruder, and you aren't picky, its something okay to throw on if you are bored on a rainy night.

The acting was pretty good - as much as any one actor had a chance to do so. But I am amazed that not one review points out how incredibly one-sided this movie is. The clearest evidence that Oswald could not have been the lone-shooter as claimed was the Zapruder film, which is an important part of this movie. But it is never shown in the movie. Also, that Oswald was already publicly announced as Kennedy's assassin within one hour of the shooting was, and still is, outrageous. Yet how anyone came to this conclusion is not even touched upon in the film. Not one single scene from the search at the TSBD, nothing until Oswald was already in custody. And how and who decided to remove the body from the hospital before an autopsy is not even touched upon, just the short heated exchange between the coroner and the Secret Service. If the film simply showed what happened in the hospital, that would be one aspect of the story. But here many other aspects are shown, and an incredible amount of detail remains not shown or even touched upon. The film has some interesting aspects, a side not shown before. But the story telling is just plain poor, leaving too many questions unanswered. They showed Oswald being shot, but nothing about what happened after, except the ER scene. OK, but then why all the stuff about the FBI and the burning of the file? Again, very selective in what is shown and not shown. I give the film 5/10 because I like the style of it and the acting. But the story itself is really poorly portrayed.