Revolutionary, overrated, or somewhere in between, Welles’s extraordinary debut turns power, ego, and misery into an enigmatic cradle-to-grave portrait of a larger-than-life figure—‘European’ in its artistic style, but fiercely American in its spirit of derring-do.
An editing masterclass that feels ahead of its time, this is Welles at his most playful and elusive—utterly fascinating if you surrender to his tricks, obvious or otherwise, as he slyly provokes with a thesis on fakery, expertise, illusion and truth.
A man is arrested for an unknowable crime and plunged into a maze of bureaucratic dread in Welles’ audacious adaptation of Kafka’s seminal text, unfolding as a hallucinatory and shapeshifting study of guilt and power.
Welles’ butchered studio film remains a remarkable showcase of his storytelling prowess, one that is haunted by deep regrets and vicious jealousies, as an aristocratic family faces inevitable decline in a modernising world.
Shakespeare meets independent cinema of the highest order in Welles’ brilliant and vital take on the tragic story of the Moor of Venice.
The story-within-a-story treatise might feel undercooked but Welles still does a lot within its short runtime, particularly creating the film’s dreamy, intoxicating atmosphere, accompanied by the ethereal music of Erik Satie.
Superbly-edited and exuding a sense of ‘new wave’ energy, Welles’ previously incomplete film before his death is now complete (or not?) in this strange, kaleidoscopic but rather uncompelling work.
Arguably Orson Welles’ finest hour as a director and actor, this resurrected masterpiece remains to be one of cinema’s most extraordinary adaptations of Shakespeare.
Eternality Tan 