JFK (1991)

JFK is a 1991 American historical legal-conspiracy thriller film directed by Oliver Stone. It examines the events leading to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and alleged cover-up through the eyes of former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner). Garrison filed charges against New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) for his alleged participation in a conspiracy to assassinate the President, for which Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman) was found responsible by a government investigation: the Warren Commission. The film was adapted by Stone and Zachary Sklar from the books On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison and Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs. Stone described this account as a "counter-myth" to the Warren Commission's "fictional myth." The film became embroiled in controversy. Upon JFK's theatrical release, many major American newspapers ran editorials accusing Stone of taking liberties with historical facts, including the film's implication that President Lyndon B. Johnson was part of a coup d'état to kill Kennedy. After a slow start at the box office, the film gradually picked up momentum, earning over $205 million in worldwide gross. JFK was nominated for eight Academy Awards (including Best Picture) and won two for Best Cinematography and Best Film Editing. It was the most successful of three films Stone made about the American Presidency, followed later by Nixon with Anthony Hopkins in the title role and W. with Josh Brolin as George W. Bush.

Plot

The film opens with newsreel footage, including the farewell address in 1961 of outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower, warning about the build-up of the "military-industrial complex". This is followed by a summary of John F. Kennedy's years as president, emphasizing the events that, in Stone's thesis, would lead to his assassination. This builds to a reconstruction of the assassination on November 22, 1963. New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison subsequently learns about potential links to the assassination in New Orleans. Garrison and his team investigate several possible conspirators, including private pilot David Ferrie (Joe Pesci), but are forced to let them go after their investigation is publicly rebuked by the federal government. Kennedy's suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is killed by Jack Ruby, and Garrison closes the investigation. The investigation is reopened in 1966 after Garrison reads the Warren Report and notices what he believes to be multiple inaccuracies. Garrison and his staff interrogate several witnesses to the Kennedy assassination, and others involved with Oswald, Ruby, and Ferrie. One such witness is Willie O'Keefe (Kevin Bacon), a male prostitute serving five years in prison for soliciting, who reveals he witnessed Ferrie discussing a coup d'état. As well as briefly meeting Oswald, O'Keefe was romantically involved with a man called "Clay Bertrand". Jean Hill (Ellen McElduff), a teacher who says she witnessed shots fired from the grassy knoll, tells the investigators that Secret Service threatened her into saying three shots came from the book depository, revealing changes that were made to her testimony by the Warren Commission. Garrison's staff also test the single bullet theory by aiming an empty rifle from the window through which Oswald was alleged to have shot Kennedy. They conclude that Oswald was too poor a marksman to make the shots, indicating someone else, or multiple marksmen, were involved. In 1968, Garrison meets a high-level figure in Washington D.C. who identifies himself as "X" (Donald Sutherland). He suggests a conspiracy at the highest levels of government, implicating members of the CIA, the Mafia, the military-industrial complex, Secret Service, FBI, and Kennedy's vice-president and then president Lyndon Baines Johnson as either co-conspirators or as having motives to cover up the truth of the assassination. X explains that the President was killed because he wanted to pull the United States out of the Vietnam War and dismantle the CIA. X encourages Garrison to keep digging and prosecute New Orleans-based international businessman Clay Shaw for his alleged involvement. Upon interrogating Shaw, the businessman denies any knowledge of meeting Ferrie, O'Keefe or Oswald, but he is soon charged with conspiring to murder the President. Some of Garrison's staff begin to doubt his motives and disagree with his methods, and leave the investigation. Garrison's marriage is strained when his wife Liz (Sissy Spacek) complains that he is spending more time on the case than with his own family. After a sinister phone call is made to their daughter, Liz accuses Garrison of being selfish and attacking Shaw only because of his homosexuality. In addition, the media launches attacks on television and in newspapers attacking Garrison's character and criticizing the way his office is spending taxpayers' money. Some key witnesses become scared and refuse to testify while others, such as Ferrie, are killed in suspicious circumstances. Before his death, Ferrie tells Garrison that he believes people are after him, and reveals there was a conspiracy around Kennedy's death. The trial of Clay Shaw takes place in 1969. Garrison presents the court with further evidence of multiple killers and dismissing the single bullet theory, and proposes a Dealey Plaza shots scenario involving three assassins who fired six total shots and framing Oswald for the murders of Kennedy and officer J. D. Tippit but the jury acquits Shaw after less than one hour of deliberation. The film reflects that members of that jury stated publicly that they believed there was a conspiracy behind the assassination, but not enough evidence to link Shaw to that conspiracy. Shaw died of lung cancer in 1974, but in 1979 Richard Helms testified that Clay Shaw had been a part-time contact of the Domestic Contacts Division of the CIA. The end credits claim that records related to the assassination will be released to the public in 2029.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFK_(film)

The Imitation Game (2014)

The Imitation Game is a 2014 American historical drama thriller film directed by Morten Tyldum, with a screenplay by Graham Moore loosely based on the biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges (previously adapted as the stage play and BBC drama Breaking the Code). It stars Benedict Cumberbatch as real-life British cryptanalyst Alan Turing, who decrypted German intelligence codes for the British government during World War II. The film's screenplay topped the annual Black List for best unproduced Hollywood scripts in 2011. The Weinstein Company acquired the film for $7 million in February 2014, the highest amount ever paid for U.S. distribution rights at the European Film Market. It was released theatrically in the United Kingdom on November 14 and the United States on November 28. The Imitation Game was a commercial and critical success. It grossed over $233 million worldwide against a $14 million production budget, making it the highest-grossing independent film of 2014. It was nominated in eight categories at the 87th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (Tyldum), Best Actor (Benedict Cumberbatch), and Best Supporting Actress (Keira Knightley). It won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. It garnered five nominations in the 72nd Golden Globe Awards and was nominated in three categories at the 21st Screen Actors Guild Awards, including Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. It also received nine British Academy of Film and Television Arts nominations, including Best Film and Outstanding British Film, and won the People's Choice Award at the 39th Toronto International Film Festival. The film was criticised for its inaccurate portrayal of historical events and Turing's character and relationships. However, the LGBT civil rights advocacy and political lobbying organisation the Human Rights Campaign honoured The Imitation Game for bringing Turing's legacy to a wider audience.

Plot

In 1951, two policemen, Nock and Staehl, investigate a break-in at the home of mathematician Alan Turing, whose suspicious behaviour and absence of war records causes Nock to believe that Turing may be a Soviet spy. The police send a man to follow Turing into a pub, where he hands an envelope to a male prostitute, who is arrested shortly afterward and confesses that Turing is a client. Staehl is ready to charge Turing with gross indecency, but Nock is still convinced that Turing is a spy, and begs Staehl to let him interrogate Turing for half an hour, whereupon the latter begins to disclose his top-secret activities during the war. In 1939, after Britain declares war on Germany, Turing is accepted by Commander Alastair Denniston, of the Royal Navy, for a code-breaking job at Bletchley Park, working alongside Hugh Alexander, John Cairncross, Peter Hilton, Keith Furman, and Charles Richards. They are instructed to break the Enigma codes that the Germans use to encrypt their communications, which, as Maj Gen Stewart Menzies of MI6 explains, allows them to attack British and American shipping, leading to famine and the loss of life. Turing works in isolation from the others, to the disappointment of his colleagues, and he concentrates all of his efforts in creating a decryption machine, instead of decoding by hand. When Denniston refuses to fund the machine's construction, Turing writes to Winston Churchill, who arranges the funding and names Turing as the team leader. Turing immediately fires Furman and Richards, who are linguists rather than mathematicians, and orders the others to construct the machine with him. There is a flashback to 1927 when Turing was in the boys-only Sherborne School, where he was bullied by other pupils but was rescued by a boy named Christopher Morcom. The latter introduces him to recreational cryptography and arouses Turing's romantic feelings, but dies after the spring break from bovine tuberculosis, leaving Turing scarred. Turing's team, which needs more people, places a crossword puzzle in the newspaper and conducts a mathematical examination for candidates, eventually selecting Joan Clarke and Jack Good. Clarke is prevented by her parents from working with an all-male team, so Turing asks her to become one of the telegraph clerks, who are female, and conveys cryptographic materials to her living quarters in secret. The machine is eventually finished, and Turing names it 'Christopher', but it takes too long to execute, whereas the ciphers of Enigma are changed on a daily basis. Denniston orders the machine to be destroyed and Turing fired, but the other cryptographers threaten to quit. Denniston relents and says he will give the team one month to decode an encrypted German message with the machine. During this time, Clarke's parents pressure her to leave Bletchley because she is unmarried and alone, and they want her home, so Turing proposes to her so she can stay. At the engagement party, Cairncross advises Turing he is aware of his homosexuality, but warns him to keep it from Joan due to the risk of being caught. During an evening at a local pub, Hugh begins to flirt with a colleague of Joan's named Helen. As they flirt, Helen jokes how she has a crush on a German but cannot pursue him, because she suspects he has a girlfriend based on the messages. Turing asks how she knows, and Helen clarifies that because the messages start with the same word, she suspects that must be someone's name. Because of this, Turing realises that the machine can be sped up by prerecognising routine phrases such as "Heil Hitler," and the recalibrated machine starts to quickly decode transmissions. However, the team realises that, should the Royal Navy act on the new information, the Germans may realise the Enigma code is broken and redesign it, thereby voiding the team's work. As such, the team conceals the success of the machine from Denniston and delivers the results to Menzies, who uses his influence to prevent the team from being fired. Menzies works with the team to determine which pieces of information can be used while arousing the least German suspicion. Around this time, Turing discovers that Cairncross is a Soviet spy, but Cairncross argues that the Soviets are allied with the UK and threatens to expose Turing's homosexuality if he tells anyone. Turing finds Menzies in Clarke's home, suspecting her of being a spy. When Turing reveals that the spy is Cairncross, Menzies explains that he already knew and has been using Cairncross to leak information of low importance. Shortly afterwards, fearing that Clarke is in trouble because of her secret involvement with the team, Turing reveals to her that he is a homosexual, hoping to drive her away. She is unfazed by this, and Turing lies that he has never cared for her. They break up, but she refuses to leave. As the war ends, Menzies tells the team to destroy all of their work and never speak of their achievements to the world. In 1951, back in the interrogation room, Nock is stunned by the story and says that he cannot judge Turing. However, Staehl has the charges pressed, and Turing is given a choice of two years in prison or chemical castration; Turing chooses the latter. He is visited at home by Clarke, who witnesses his physical and mental deterioration. She comforts him by saying that his work saved millions of lives. In the end, the team is shown in 1945 burning all of their documents, and a caption reveals that Turing committed suicide in 1954, aged 41.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game

Schindler's List (1993)

Schindler's List is a 1993 American epic historical period drama film, directed and co-produced by Steven Spielberg and scripted by Steven Zaillian. It is based on the novel Schindler's Ark by Australian novelist, Thomas Keneally. The film relates a period in the life of Oskar Schindler, an ethnic German businessman, during which he saved the lives of more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. It stars Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ralph Fiennes as Schutzstaffel (SS) officer Amon Göth, and Ben Kingsley as Schindler's Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern. Ideas for a film about the Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews) were proposed as early as 1963. Poldek Pfefferberg, one of the Schindlerjuden, made it his life's mission to tell the story of Schindler. Spielberg became interested in the story when executive Sid Sheinberg sent him a book review of Schindler's Ark. Universal Studios bought the rights to the novel, but Spielberg, unsure if he was ready to make a film about the Holocaust, tried to pass the project to several other directors before finally deciding to direct the film himself. Principal photography took place in Kraków, Poland, over the course of 72 days in 1993. Spielberg shot the film in black and white and approached it as a documentary. Cinematographer Janusz Kamiński wanted to give the film a sense of timelessness. John Williams composed the score, and violinist Itzhak Perlman performs the film's main theme. Schindler's List premiered on November 30, 1993, in Washington, D.C. and it was released on December 15, 1993, in the United States. Often listed among the greatest films ever made, it was also a box office success, earning $321.2 million worldwide on a $22 million budget. It was the recipient of seven Academy Awards (out of twelve nominations), including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score, as well as numerous other awards (including seven BAFTAs and three Golden Globes). In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked the film 8th on its list of the 100 best American films of all time. The Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2004.

PLOT

In Kraków during World War II, the Germans had forced local Polish Jews into the overcrowded Kraków Ghetto. Oskar Schindler, an ethnic German, arrives in the city hoping to make his fortune. A member of the Nazi Party, Schindler lavishes bribes on Wehrmacht (German armed forces) and SS officials and acquires a factory to produce enamelware. To help him run the business, Schindler enlists the aid of Itzhak Stern, a local Jewish official who has contacts with black marketeers and the Jewish business community. Stern helps Schindler arrange financing for the factory. Schindler maintains friendly relations with the Nazis and enjoys wealth and status as "Herr Direktor", and Stern handles administration. Schindler hires Jewish workers because they cost less, while Stern ensures that as many people as possible are deemed essential to the German war effort, which saves them from being transported to concentration camps or killed. SS-Untersturmführer (second lieutenant) Amon Göth arrives in Kraków to oversee construction of Płaszów concentration camp. When the camp is completed, he orders the ghetto liquidated. Many people are shot and killed in the process of emptying the ghetto. Schindler witnesses the massacre and is profoundly affected. He particularly notices a tiny girl in a red coat – one of the few splashes of color in the black-and-white film – as she hides from the Nazis, and later sees her body (identifiable by the red coat) among those on a wagon load of corpses. Schindler is careful to maintain his friendship with Göth and, through bribery and lavish gifts, continues to enjoy SS support. Göth brutally mistreats his Jewish maid Helen Hirsch and randomly shoots people from the balcony of his villa, and the prisoners are in constant fear for their lives. As time passes, Schindler's focus shifts from making money to trying to save as many lives as possible. To better protect his workers, Schindler bribes Göth into allowing him to build a sub-camp. As the Germans begin to lose the war, Göth is ordered to ship the remaining Jews at Płaszów to Auschwitz concentration camp. Schindler asks Göth to allow him to move his workers to a new munitions factory he plans to build in his home town of Zwittau-Brinnlitz. Göth agrees, but charges a huge bribe. Schindler and Stern create "Schindler's List" – a list of people to be transferred to Brinnlitz and thus saved from transport to Auschwitz. The train carrying the women and children is accidentally redirected to Auschwitz-Birkenau; Schindler bribes Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, with a bag of diamonds to win their release. At the new factory, Schindler forbids the SS guards to enter the production rooms and encourages the Jews to observe the Jewish Sabbath. He spends much of his fortune bribing Nazi officials and buying shell casings from other companies; his factory does not produce any usable armaments during its seven months of operation. Schindler runs out of money in 1945, just as Germany surrenders, ending the war in Europe. As a Nazi Party member and war profiteer, Schindler must flee the advancing Red Army to avoid capture. The SS guards in Schindler's factory have been ordered to kill the Jews, but Schindler persuades them not to, so that they can "return to [their] families as men, instead of murderers." He bids farewell to his workers and prepares to head west, hoping to surrender to the Americans. The workers give Schindler a signed statement attesting to his role saving Jewish lives, together with a ring engraved with a Talmudic quotation: "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." Schindler is touched but is also deeply ashamed, as he feels he should have done even more. As the Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews) wake up the next morning, a Soviet soldier announces that they have been liberated. The Jews leave the factory and walk to a nearby town. Following scenes depicting Göth's execution after the war and a summary of Schindler's later life, the black-and-white frame changes to a color shot of actual Schindlerjuden at Schindler's grave in Jerusalem. Accompanied by the actors who portrayed them, the Schindlerjuden place stones on the grave. In the final shot, Neeson places a pair of roses on the grave.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia -  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schindler%27s_List