Critic Reviews

In Oswald's Ghost, his vast chronicle of the JFK assassination and its cultural aftermath, Stone uses little-seen footage to assemble the events of Nov. 22, 1963, with a fascinating present-tense density.

Veteran conspiracy buffs probably won’t find much of Stone's material particularly new, but Stone’s film does serve as a neat summary for the rest of us while offering a number of intriguing insights into how conspiracy theories work and what they say about specific cultural and political climates.

Though we had just heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald, I believed he had done it alone. I still do, even more so after watching Robert Stone's meticulously researched, seemingly unbiased summary of the killing and the major conspiracy theories.

Oswald's Ghost impresses as a concise, intelligent and rigorously well-researched piece of work.

Late in the film, Stone interviews Norman Mailer, a one-time conspiracy-believer who eventually wrote a book that tried to get inside Oswald's head, explaining how Oswald's story is America's story. In less than a minute, Mailer describes the documentary Stone should've made.

Lee Harvey Oswald's guilt or innocence or accomplices are not the point of the film; Stone is more interested in the fact that much about the Kennedy murder is now so shrouded in myth and mystification as to be permanently unknowable, and that that fact alone has gnawed away at the self-confidence of middle-class white America ever since.

The documentary Oswald’s Ghost initially plays as yet another primer on the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the vilification of Lee Harvey Oswald.

While trying to establish whether a conspiracy took place, the film attempts to solve the enigma that was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Riveting yet ultimately unsatisfying documentary.

As a history lesson, Oswald's Ghost is valuable, but don't go expecting any new revelations.