Weekend Movie Forecast: Crossing Over, An American Affair

Taking place between the Bay of Pigs fiasco and Kennedy’s assassination, An American Affair concerns, among other things, a 13-year-old boy's obsession with a CIA agent's sultry ex-wife (Gretchen Mol), who's having an affair with JFK. The boy's stalking gets him swept up in the intrigue boiling over in the months before the president's assassination.

Stephen Holden at the Times writes, "Because it is crammed with vintage television and film footage of the Kennedy years, An American Affair has illusions of itself as a serious docudrama. But as it wades deeper into a conspiratorial swamp that involves angry Cubans, a shadowy C.I.A. plot and Adam’s pilfering of Catherine’s tell-all diary, the movie becomes a risible fusion of cloak-and-dagger melodrama and prurient coming-of-age story (Summer of ’63?).

"In the most squirm-inducing scene, the boy and his centerfold, drawn together by grief, actually lock lips. Were it a farce instead of an earnest, paranoid thriller with pretensions to historicity, An American Affair might not seem so offensively exploitative. The fact that it is quite well acted, especially by Ms. Mol, who has the air of a sophisticated 1960s party animal down pat, only compounds the insult."