Parkland

The boring devil is in the details for the historical drama Parkland. John F. Kennedy is a young, charismatic American president on a routine trip to Texas in 1963. The fate of that journey (spoilers: it doesn't go well) are told through the ancillary characters least important to history in this Peter Landesman film. James Badge Dale wonders if his brother, Lee Harvey Oswald, could be involved in a crime, while Billy Bob Thornton's Secret Service agent rushes around film labs trying to develop Paul Giamatti's Zapruder footage. At its best, Parkland shows characters lost in the minutiae of events beyond themselves, like the doctors suddenly forced to cut open their president. At its worst, Ron Livingston sits around an FBI office eating lunch. A disjointed gumbo, without any central characters or coherence, Parkland is as messy and tragic as the events it depicts. —Jacob Boon