The Great McGinty (Preston Sturges)
While funny in spots (possibly three), it's not all that great. It's too flimsy to be a good satire, too serious to be a good comedy, and too silly to be a good drama. The best parts of the film may be Brian Donlevy's snappy dress sense, and the tropical bar scenes, which are too few and too far between. In fact, had the screenplay gone a different way, the "banana republic" setting could have made for a fine noir mystery as McGinty's past catches up with him, but the backstory itself is not very interesting.
JFK (Oliver Stone)
It's hard to be an Oliver Stone fan, mainly because he's nuts and the films he makes are often pure distillations of that, full of street preacher intensity and a dogmatic pressing for "the truth", whatever that may be. JFK is one such film, taking the Jim Garrison inquiry into the Kennedy assassination as the absolute truth on the matter and pulling pretty much everyone in the world except Lee Harvey Oswald into a massive conspiracy. The first half is definitely the strongest, as a series of bizarre characters played by such actors as Joe Pesci, John Candy, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and Kevin Bacon are introduced and connected to the madness, with some great eccentric performances being delivered in the process. Kevin Costner is a good fit for the lead, whose lines, delivered in what I assume to be Yat dialect, start off hammy ("I'm ashamed to be an American today.") veer into Alex Jones "wake up sheeple" territory, but with at least some semblance of sanity beneath them, and by the end of the film I did come to sympathise with him and his cause, even if in reality the whole thing may be nonsense — but isn't that the joy of a good conspiracy theory, that the crazier it gets the more enticing it becomes? I saw the directors cut, which comes in at a whopping 3hr20m duration, but it never really felt like it was dragging, and that's no mean feat. It's definitely an entertaining film, and while craziness abound from very early on it is never so dense as to require a huge amount of effort to follow.