Parkland Reviews
Top CriticThis episodic drama is set in Dallas during the three days after the JFK assassination, and some of it is highly charged.
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| Original Score: B
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.
Takes one of the most traumatizing events of the American 20th century and turns it into a trivia digest.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
For those who remember that dark day, it will inevitably have impact. But this was too much of a story for one film.
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| Original Score: C+
I can see this film being shown in high school, as a way to fill up two-or-three periods. But I can't see anyone wanting to see it on their own. Especially if they already lived through it once.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
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.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
There's something to be said for Landesman's attempt to limit himself to just the facts that we can all agree on. Just that much is dramatic enough and awful enough to make for a good movie.
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| Original Score: 3/4
"Parkland" succeeds as it fails. For whatever its flaws, it is unforgettable.
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| Original Score: 3/5
A collection of powerful scenes that somehow add up to something less than powerful.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The events of those days would have been better covered in greater depth in a miniseries, rather than a 90-minute movie.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Parkland is wildly uneven, although compulsively watchable.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Peter Landesman's well-made but dramatically unfocused re-creation of that November day and its aftermath ...
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The assassination of John F. Kennedy, as seen through the eyes of bystanders, insiders and other players.
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| Original Score: 3/4
There are 8 million stories in this naked tragedy. Parkland is content to tell parts of some of them.
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| Original Score: B-
Methodically and with generally unfailing good restraint, Landesman re-creates the grief surrounding the crime and the confusion of Oswald's capture and subsequent murder.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
While pretending to avoid controversy, debut director Peter Landesman continually steps out of bounds.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Peter Landesman's bland Parkland approaches history by way of mediocrity.
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| Original Score: 2/4
[Parkland] might have made for a stirring documentary. Instead, first-time director Peter Landesman opts to treat history as a parade of cameos from the famous and not-so-famous.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
It's a worthy film, well shot, well told, but told at a remove. This is understandable, given what Landesman is trying to do.
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| Original Score: 3/5
The movie winds up telling us far more about our own time than the nation-changing event that it depicts.
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| Original Score: 3/5
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.
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| Original Score: 2/4
All we learn is that this happened and then this and then this -- the movie is like a multimillion-dollar grade-school play.
An absorbing new footnote to a history lesson that will never fade.
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| Original Score: 3/4
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 tone never stops waffling, and nothing truly revelatory ever emerges about those terrible few days in Texas. What we're left with is the Disney theme-park version of history-all waxworks and weepiness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Well-intentioned but unfulfilling ...
A relatively watchable film that needed a bit more connective tissue.
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| Original Score: 6.2/10
Once Kennedy is pronounced dead, "Parkland" goes downhill fast, with a tone of TV-movie solemnity, epitomized by James Newton Howard's heavy-handed score, taking over.
The film is otherwise engrossing, quietly revelatory, and often profoundly moving as it retells a story we only thought we knew.
[An] inadvertently tacky restaging of events.
