Parkland Reviews
We Got This Covered
Parkland is a frustratingly slight docudrama that does a poor job of explaining why its many characters, which stand on the periphery of JFK's assassination, are intriguing historical figures whose stories deserve to be told.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/10
Examiner.com
Parkland works when focusing on the little things, making us feel like true witnesses to history rather than judging it through the benefit of hindsight.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The Playlist
This November marks the 50th anniversary of his assassination in Dealey Plaza, and as such, it was inevitable that there'd be some kind of film to mark the occasion. We just wish it wasn't as terrible as "Parkland,"
Full Review
| Original Score: D-
ScreenRant
By the end, Parkland does little more than exploit JFK's murder through a cinematic recreation - one that fails to shed new light or insight.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
CraveOnline
Somehow, Parkland turns the John F. Kennedy assassination into 'just a bunch of stuff that happened.'
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/10
FilmDrunk
A shouty acting exercise masquerading as history. Like Jobs before it, Parkland is a movie that seems to have been researched with exhaustive study of other movies and only a cursory skim of its own subject matter. DRAMA!
Full Review
| Original Score: D+
HitFix
Structured a little like a hypothetical 1963 Twitter timeline, narrowed by the hashtag #JFKRIP: none of the participants have much to say about the man or his absence, but they're appropriately sad about it.
Full Review
| Original Score: D
Top CriticAll we learn is that this happened and then this and then this -- the movie is like a multimillion-dollar grade-school play.
Austin American-Statesman
JFK conspiracy advocates are invited to hold their letters; Parkland isn't really about all that, which is both a strength and a weakness. In contrast to, say, the phantasmagorical JFK, it is impossible to tell where history stops and Parkland begins.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Somehow, all this commotion adds up to aimless inertia, in part because the movie lacks a point of view - let alone anything fresh to propose about the assassination or its peripheral players.
While this cast and this story could easily have filled, say, a ten-hour HBO miniseries, this 93-minute film too often feels like a blink-and-you'll-miss-em affair.
The minidramas on display, in the hospital or in the anguish of Zapruder's accidental chronicling of a horror, dart this way and that, inconclusively.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Screen International
Proves both melodramatic and undernourished, although this ensemble piece is grimly compelling throughout.
Fifty years after the traumatic event, the assassination of JFK is still capable of touching a raw nerve -- even in a dramatization as flat-footed as this one.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Slant Magazine
The Peter Landesman film's overt politics are minimal, aside from defaulting to the myth of John F. Kennedy as a martyr for...something.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
EntertainmentTell
Takes one of the most fascinating days in American history, and makes it deathly boring.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
San Diego Union-Tribune
It tries to take on too many players at once, and as such, none of the characters are truly fleshed out.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Daily Herald (IL)
The results come close to those cheesy re-enactments we see during "true crime" documentaries on Oxygen and other cable channels.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Blu-ray.com
The pressure of panic is vividly captured in the early going of the movie, but the story ends up elsewhere, lost in melodrama and a meandering sense of focus.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Takes one of the most traumatizing events of the American 20th century and turns it into a trivia digest.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
