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.
Screening on the 55th anniversary of the killing, the film presents the events through the eyes of ordinary people caught up in the events of 22 November in Dallas, giving 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, sometimes moving and always compelling.
