"Parkland" is a docudrama about the events that occurred in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
The film stars Zac Efron, Paul Giamatti, Billy Bob Thornton, Jacki Weaver, and Jeremy Strong, in a limited theater release, but is it a movie worth seeing? If you're a JFK conspiracy theorist, the film may intrigue. If you're not into the JFK assassination theories, then the movie will likely fall flat with you.
Check out what critics had to say about the film and the trailer below.
The Chicago Tribune gives "Parkland" two stars:
"We may never know who really was involved in the killing of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. But the opposite poles of the existing theories, cinematic division, stand in clear and livid disagreement. Oliver Stone in 'JFK' argued that everybody did it except your mother.
And the squishy new drama 'Parkland', a wan human-interest procedural focusing on some of the event's lesser-known players, restates the conclusion of the Warren Commission: That Lee Harvey Oswald, lone gunman, flagrant wing nut, acted on his own, and the rest of you conspiracy idiots can just shut up about anti-Castro Cubans and Kennedy-hating Mafiosi and various slithering snakes on the grassy knoll."
Philly.com says the film will give you a different perspective:
"Parkland" is the kind of measured, doc-style recreation of events that hopes, via this process, to locate something definitive or revealing. But the movie will reveal different things to casual moviegoers and assassination buffs. Most folks, for instance, will view JFK's tracheotomy as a simple (though gruesome) emergency room procedure.
To buffs, it's prelude to a larger (and probably endless) argument about whether emergency room physicians recognized the president's throat wound as an entry or exit wound, whether they destroyed evidence by enlarging it. Still, the movie's proscribed, you-are-there approach does yield some interesting moments."
RottonTomatoes.com says it's certified rotten with 47 percent positive ratings.
"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," said Ella Taylor, NPR.
"Exactly what was the mood in Dallas prior to John F. Kennedy's stop there in 1963? He wasn't liked much, which was the point behind the visit. Lest we forget, 'Parkland' reminds us that these things are true," said Jeanne Kaplan, Kaplan vs. Kaplan.
