Oswald's Ghost

Robert Stone, the director of Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, has become one of our most important documentarians — a filmmaker who reclaims history. In Oswald's Ghost, his vast chronicle of the JFK assassination and its cultural aftermath, Stone uses little-seen footage to assemble the events of Nov. 22, 1963, with a fascinating present-tense density. He then enters the vortex of conspiracy theory, only to free us from its dark tangle. Figures like the anti-lone-gunman buff Mark Lane have their say, but the movie's bard is Norman Mailer, whose dissection of Lee Harvey Oswald is more chilling than any conspiracy. A