Oswald's Ghost

The documentary “Oswald’s Ghost” initially plays as yet another primer on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the vilification of Lee Harvey Oswald, the normalization of conspiracy theory and the collective aftershocks of a murder many Americans still consider unsolved.
Because the movie covers well-worn territory — and interviews the usual boldface names, including the assassination theorists Mark Lane and Edward Jay Epstein, the former CBS beat reporter Dan Rather and Norman Mailer — its existence raises a question: Why go here again?
The answer coalesces in the film’s second half. The director Robert Stone (“Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst”) draws parallels between the Johnson-Nixon era and the post-9/11 years — periods of introspection, paranoia, conservative-liberal animosity, executive-branch secrecy and war.
These comparisons aren’t new, either, but Mr. Stone does a diligent, sometimes eerie job of articulating them. Along the way he showcases plenty of television news snippets of Oswald and his assassin, Jack Ruby; Mr. Lane; the future senator Arlen Specter, who coined the dismissive phrase “magic bullet”; and other pivotal players. And he collects autumnal interviews with witnesses to a period when it seemed, to quote Mailer, “as if God had removed his sanction from America.”
Da The New York Times, 30 Novembre 2007