Echoes of Dallas: Six Decades of JFK on the Silver Screen — The Twenty-Tens

Hollywood blockbusters try to smother the legacy of Oliver Stone's 'JFK,' but scripted hints of popular doubt over Warren Report orthodoxy still crop up

Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti) films President Kennedy’s motorcade in the 2013 feature film, “Parkland.” (Credit: Internet Movie Database)

This is the last in a six-part series on how Hollywood moviemakers have portrayed and distilled the JFK assassination. Part 1, the Sixties: Here. Part 2, the Seventies: Here. Part 3, the Eighties: Here. Part 4, The Nineties: Here. The 2000s: Here.

Cinema is full of allegory and symbolism, even if mainstream movie critics don’t tend to dwell on subliminal messaging in screenplays they review. But hints of popular suspicion about the official version of the JFK assassination still have found expression on the silver screen over a half-century after Dallas, even in big productions that didn’t contest that version or offered no meaningful insight into the true nature of the crime itself.

In the decade of the assassination’s 50th anniversary, only one movie rejected the “lone gunman” scenario outright, a highly acclaimed, mega-budget epic which capped the 2010s with a reference to Mafia culpability in a single standout scene. However, while expensive historical dramatizations of the JFK era generally swept conspiracy under the rug, focusing on the emotional travails of their subjects, they almost always betrayed enduring public skepticism toward the official history somewhere, however briefly.