by Steve Brennan

Created on: March 18, 2009   Last Updated: March 19, 2009

There are few directors who polarize critical opinion like Oliver Stone. On the one hand some people will tell you he's a film-making genius exposing dark secrets and deep corruption at the heart of the American dream, while others regard him as an overly zealous burned-out lunatic, his mind in a state of constant hyperactive paranoia. The reality probably lies somewhere in between, and on the evidence of his movies the average viewer is likely to come to the conclusion that he's an outstanding filmmaker, but a poor historian.

Wall Street is enjoyable mostly for the powerhouse performance of Michael Douglas, but it's a film painted in very broad strokes as soon as Martin Sheen appears as the good ol' blue collar working class salt of the earth airline worker it becomes too predictable. There's the histrionic excesses of Natural Born Killers, a movie so overblown that Quentin Tarantino (!) disowned it, and his historical epic Alexander, which received a deserved critical thrashing.

There are two films in his canon that have drawn more attention than any others. One of them is the truly great Platoon, his devastating portrayal of the disintegration of human conscience during the Vietnam War, which deservedly bagged him a couple of Oscars. The other is JFK, which is a difficult movie to review. As a movie of pure entertainment, it is impossible to fault, rattling along from revelation to revelation and constructed with an artist's attention to detail. But JFK was never intended as a movie of pure entertainment, as Stone himself stated at the time. He was on a mission to tell people "the truth" about the Kennedy assassination, and JFK seems, upon first viewing, to contain so much solid and incontrovertible evidence of a vast government / CIA / Cuban / Mafia / God knows who else conspiracy that you find yourself wondering why on Earth it's been ignored for so long. And here lies the movie's Achilles heel: once you begin to dig a little deeper into the background, you realize exactly how much of this film is built on some very wet sand indeed.

Kevin Costner puts in a career-best performance as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who pulls in a suspect named David Ferrie (Joe Pesci at his hyperactive best) immediately following JFK's assassination, supposedly because he was an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald's (a terrific Gary Oldman). Although Ferrie is clearly hiding something, Garrison has no choice but to let him go free, and gets on with his life happily

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