To mark the fifty-eighth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as well as the thirtieth anniversary of his landmark film JFK, three-time Oscar winner Oliver Stone returns to the scene of the crime in his new documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass.

After scoring an Oscar for writing 1978’s Midnight Express, 1991’s JFK capped what is arguably the most meteoric rise of a filmmaker with a radical sensibility in Hollywood history. Stone’s 1986 classic grunt’s eye view of combat, Platoon, earned four Academy Award nominations and won four more, including Best Picture and Best Director. He was also nominated that year for Best Writing of both Platoon and Salvador, which explicitly opposed President Ronald Reagan’s Central America policy. The Vietnam War veteran won his second Best Director Oscar for 1989’s antiwar Born on the Fourth of July, which was also nominated in the Best Picture and Best Writing categories. Two years later, Stone’s enormously controversial but influential JFK received six nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Writing, and won in the editing and cinematography categories.

Less well-known, however, are Stone’s more recent documentaries about Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, Hugo Chavez, and 2012’s nonfiction miniseries for Showtime, The Untold History of the United States. Now, that cinematic scourge of the status quo is back with the nearly two-hour documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass. In it, Stone goes further than he did in 1991 in trying to crack the case and reveal who the great helmsmen of Kennedy’s assassination were. The seventy-five-year-old auteur spoke with Jacobin via Zoom from his home in Los Angeles and proved, as the Russian revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky put it, there’s no gray hair in his soul.