For Fans of Oliver Stone

Platoon is the entry point because it earns everything Stone later does with scale and spectacle. It is personal before it is political. He fought in Vietnam; the film knows what mud and fear and moral collapse actually feel like. Once you have felt its ground-level weight, every subsequent film makes more sense: you understand why he is so angry, and why the camera can never quite hold still.

Made just before Platoon on an almost non-existent budget, Salvador stars James Woods as a morally compromised freelance journalist covering the Salvadoran civil war. It is rawer and faster than anything else in Stone's filmography, and it shows a director working with pure urgency before the studios gave him the means to be grandiose. If you have only seen his bigger films, this will reset your sense of what he can do.

Mr. Robot is the closest television has come to Stone's particular frequency: paranoid, formally restless, convinced that the systems running our lives are fraudulent, and willing to use every cinematic trick available to make that case. Sam Esmail shoots television the way Stone shoots history, with intent and controlled aggression. The debt is real, even if it goes unacknowledged.

Libra, DeLillo's novel about Lee Harvey Oswald, covers the same territory as JFK and reaches genuinely different conclusions through the novelist's tools rather than the filmmaker's. Where Stone hammers at conspiracy with evidence and cross-cutting, DeLillo inhabits the interior lives of the people involved and makes the uncertainty feel existential rather than accusatory. Read it alongside JFK for the full argument; then read American Tabloid to see what James Ellroy does with the same raw material when he decides that everyone is guilty.