Parkland

Paul Giamatti, Zac Efron and Billy Bob Thornton are among the cast in this absorbing drama about the 1963 assassination of US president John F Kennedy

Paul Giamatti, Zac Efron and Billy Bob Thornton are among the cast in this absorbing drama about the 1963 assassination of US president John F Kennedy.

Presenting the events through the eyes of ordinary people caught up in the events of that November day in Dallas gives the familiar tragedy a novel edge.

These include Giamatti’s Abraham Zapruder, the local businessman who famously caught the killing on his Super 8 camera, Efron’s emergency room doctor Jim Carrico and head ER nurse Doris Nelson (Marcia Gay Harden), on duty at Parkland hospital when the mortally wounded Kennedy was brought in, and Thornton’s FBI agent Forrest Sorrels.

Journalist-turned-director Peter Landesman doesn’t step back and attempt to give the bigger picture – which won’t find him favour with conspiracy theorists – but the tiny details he accumulates are telling and sometimes moving.