Nixon

Oliver Stone's portrait of Richard Nixon is not content to cover Watergate; it starts in his childhood and builds how he assembled power and lost it as a tragedy. Anthony Hopkins plays Nixon, wearing a hairpiece and false teeth for the resemblance, and was nominated for Best Actor. The film opens on a card: an attempt to understand the truth, based on numerous public sources and on an incomplete historical record. It concedes its own speculation from the first frame. Two days before release the Nixon family issued a statement calling parts of it reprehensible and saying it was designed to defame and degrade the memories of the President and Mrs Nixon. Stone answered that his aim was to understand Nixon fully, the good and the bad, the triumphs and the tragedies. The box office was a disaster: 13.6 million dollars domestically against a 44 million budget, among the biggest disappointments of 1995. It received four Oscar nominations and won none: Hopkins, Joan Allen, John Williams's score and the screenplay. Who it is for: viewers who like political biography and Stone's dense editing. Who it is not for: anyone wanting historical exactness. The film admits that itself at the start, and across 192 minutes it never pauses.