There is no film of Oswald himself actually in the act of firing a gun at anything. There is no film of Oswald even carrying a gun that day.There is neither film nor any photograph of Oswald in or around Dealy Plaza at all, shooting or otherwise.There were no witnesses who saw Oswald himself shoot at the car (one witness saw someone shoot- but couldn't ID who).No witness put Oswald on the sixth floor of the building at the time of the shooting. Someone was there, but who?Oswald appeared in 3 or 4 separate police lineups after the shooting but nobody at these face-to-face viewings identified him as shooting anything in Dealy Plaza.Oswald was never tried in a court of law for any crimes committed on November 22, 1963. Oswald himself was murdered. He was assassinated.The Warren Commission postulated that there were two Lone Nuts- Oswald and Ruby. Even if you think they were nuts, there is little or no evidence that they were "Lone" nuts. They were both very talented at covering their shady associations (and they had many).Thousands of CIA documents were released in the 90's but with huge blacked-out spaces. No less than Tom Brokaw of NBC said (I believe in 1999) that there may be "a million" documents still secret, not to be released until as late as 2050.No film or witnesses against Oswald. No trial of Oswald. Still-secret documents. It always amazes me that Peter Jennings or anyone can be so certain that there WASN'T a conspiracy, or that so-called "buffs" can be so certain that there WAS one.

That is about the extent of this film's contribution. If you think Todd Gitlin, or Tom Hayden know beans about any of this, their participation will disabuse you of that notion. And if you have forgotten how Mark Lane got rich off his speculations on the assassination, here is a reminder.If you think polling a subset of less than 2% of the US population is key to understanding an issue in which Stone tells us more than 70% of the US population is united in having no faith in the Warren Report, you will love the wacky logic of OSWALD'S GHOST.A LOT of opinion and very few facts. I find the musings of an Mailer on his last legs interesting because I find Mailer's thought processes interesting, but he adds nothing to the issues here either. One might as well hear yet another actor tells you what he/she "thinks" about politics. They do better when someone writes their lines.The objective of this documentary is to show how "dark revanchist forces" (AKA Republicans, generals, intelligence folks, corporate types etc), as opposed to the good old-time lefty Marxist doctrine, resorted to assassination in the cases of JFK, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and the like to hold back "the future." If you have somehow missed out of on the many "documentary" efforts of film makers like Stone to get this point across, here is another chance.Case in point, it is useful to have Edward Jay Epstein's send up of Garrison's numerological idiocies, but whatever viewers think about "who dun it," and we have a lot of evidence here on IMDb that there are a lot of opinions about that, Stone intentionally ignores the hardest evidence of what really counts right under his nose.The key point is that there is no evidence as yet that ANY single assassin can have pulled off the JFK assassination... Oswald or anyone else. Trying to aim and fire all those shots and make two hits with a piece of crap like a Carcano bolt action with that scope... just hasn't worked.Any fair minded analyst must concede THAT makes a lot of difference to evaluating a film like OSWALD'S GHOST which is more agitprop than Doc.EVERY attempt to duplicate the marksmanship required of the "one assassin in six seconds" theory over the past 40 years has failed. One of the most detailed attempts to duplicate it was put together by CBS News a few years after the assassination. Stone carries a few feet of film showing the test underway. But Stone never tells us that CBS couldn't duplicate it either.It does matter. Stone is just another tourist, putting together his idea of pretty faces that the PBS PC will find acceptable and same-old same-old commentary with no context and no understanding of what he is dealing with. Hey, they paid him and ran it.Too bad that was enough for him

I saw this today and I was impressed with some of the archival footage and some of the interviews given. It's worth checking out if you're interested and/or have some knowledge on the case. I guess I would have liked to have heard more from Mailer and more on Oswald. I do think they gave some good information on a few details JFK missed. This is an informative and sometimes stylish documentary, worth checking out, the only reason I won't give more details on some of the plot points is for the fact that they had a lot to do with the conspiracy and a lot of them were red herrings. What this documentary does is put a few things into perspective, i.e. Oswalds motive, Dan Rathers comment saying the presidents head went forward, etc. My reason for giving this a ten was simply because the rating's too low, it deserves a 7 out of 10. Recommended.

This documentary starts with the assassination of President Kennedy and covers the theories and "facts" put forward around the actions of Oswald and others. As well as this it continues into the modern day to the ghost of Oswald hanging over America through the ongoing theories in the modern media.The subject matter is always going to be interesting. Whether it is the infamous "back and to the left" shot or other details taken in solitude or in combination, I think it is fair to say that many people do have some doubt about the idea that a solitary gunman killed Kennedy from the position in the book depository, although they may differ in how far they take their theories in regards what really happened. However the risk with any film that covers an extensively covered subject is that it will not have anything distinctive or new to offer. Although this film vaguely has a theme of Oswald in a wider socio-political context, this doesn't really happen apart from the final 15 minutes where we slightly touch on Oliver Stone's film and the modern view of Oswald. However outside of this it is very much a straight history of the assassination that looks at the event itself, Jack Ruby, the Warren report and so on.It is a solid enough documentary in how it does this and, if you know little of the history then it is a very good entry level film thanks to the relatively "factual", non-sensational approach that is also lacking an obvious slant one way or another. The problem with it is that it really offers very little that you have not seen one place or another. In fact, by covering the entire story, it means that you will have seen more detail on every aspect of this somewhere else that has dealt with just that aspect at a deeper level.The overall impression then is of a summary, of a film that pulls everything together in one place and acts as a way to get a bit of the whole story in case you then want to go away and find more yourself about the Warren Report, about the theories, about Jack Ruby and so on. Thing is, with the story so widely covered and known, is that really a service we need another product to be fulfilling.