Nixon

Oliver Stone's most complex and intriguing film is an epic anti-docudrama about the hated 37th US president. Stone looks at Nixon's life (a tour de force performance by Anthony Hopkins) as a Shakespearean drama and the White House as a haunted castle in which Nixon is at the mercy of his demons and haunted by the shadow of John F. Kennedy in the last phase of his tenure. According to CIA man Howard Hunt (Ed Harris), a key figure in the Watergate scandal that brought down Tricky Dicky, his boss is ‘the darkness reaching for the darkness.' Which gives a good idea of the (auto)destructive forces Nixon struggled with. In his book The Presidents, Freddy Gray quotes Marx's slogan that ‘history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, then as a farce.’ Nixon is the tragedy; Trump the farce.