Killing Kennedy

The pace and the performances carry the film.

Rob Lowe does a respectable turn as JFK... [But] It’s the lesser-known story of Lee Harvey Oswald, expertly played with simmering anger by Will Rothhaar, that’s most interesting.

Killing Kennedy easily could have been twice its length, the better to add both nuance and context. Instead it’s a watchable film with many missing parts, a broadly drawn Classics Illustrated version of what happened and why.

We already know too much and paradoxically too little about the JFK assassination. A TV movie needed to tell us something we don't know. No dice here.

You won't come away from it with any new answers, but it's a useful reminder of why the drama of that day has transfixed Americans for half a century.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with Killing Kennedy. We just don’t need the splashes of Hollywood in a story we already know way too well.

Killing Kennedy is so earnest and episodic as to sap any dramatic life from the movie, which weaves in selected news footage to enhance its sense of authenticity. Virtually all the dialogue is stiff and on the nose.... The entire cast is about as animated as the figures in Disney World’s Hall of Presidents.