Latest in Orson Welles

The Cannes Film Festival has set its lineup for this year’s Cannes Classics program, which shines a spotlight on restorations of classic movies and features contemporary documentaries about film. Kicking off the sidebar is Jean Eustache's controversial film The Mother and the Whore, the 1973 Cannes Grand Prize winner…

The Cannes Film Festival has unveiled the lineup for its 2021 Cannes Classics section. Made up of a selection of restored prints, the roster also includes new documentaries that explore the history of cinema. Among the offerings is Mark Cousins’ pre-opening doc, The Storms Of Jeremy Thomas, which covers a yearly drive…

Norman Lloyd was the last one standing. For a long time, it looked like an extended, slow-motion foot-race between Norman and Olivia de Havilland as to who would be the final significant figure from Hollywood's golden age to pass from Earth to the eternal cinematic firmament. But Olivia left us in July of last year at…

EXCLUSIVE: It has only been about a quarter of a century since he started it, but filmmaker Joshua Grossberg’s Quixotic documented quest to find the original print of Orson Welles’ 1942 classic The Magnificent Ambersons has enlisted a powerful media partner to help in his long journey to solving one of cinema’s great…

Coming off a Best Actor Oscar win for Darkest Hour, Gary Oldman had a lot of choices. But following up that remarkable portrait of Winston Churchill during the war years with another real-life figure  an alcoholic screenwriter from Hollywood’s golden era, could not be more of a polar opposite. The result however is…

Movies about the making of movies rarely find an audience. That long-standing Hollywood dictum will be defied this weekend with the Netflix release of Mank, but here's the rub: The central character is a critic who becomes a screenwriter who becomes a victim. That may be a clue as to why Mank this week is receiving…

For decades a majority of film historians and critics have placed Orson Welles’ seminal 1941 classic Citizen Kane at, or near, the top of just about every list of the greatest films ever made. I recently re-watched it in preparation for seeing David Fincher’s remarkable new film Mank . Mank tells the tale of…

It’s Terrific! That was the simple advertising line that adorned most posters and newspaper ads for the landmark film Citizen Kane when it was released in 1941. Let me say the same line applies to David Fincher’s masterpiece Mank, a film centering on the creation of the script for Kane and the man who shares official…

At the time, in November 1970, it must have seemed like an ideal match, a meeting of renegade titans: Orson Welles, the long-ago boy genius of theater and films who never got a job directing in Hollywood after 1958, and Dennis Hopper, whose out-of-nowhere smash with Easy Rider in 1969 made him the boy wonder of the…

BREAKING: After making the groundbreaking series House of Cards and Mindhunter at Netflix, David Fincher will direct his first feature film for the streaming service. He’ll helm Mank, a long gestating dream project for the filmmaker about the man who shared the Best Original screenplay for Citizen Kane with Orson…

EXCLUSIVE: The mission of the filmmaker should be "to preside over divine accidents," Orson Welles once told me. Indeed, his career and lifestyle seemed designed to foster accidents, divine or otherwise. A case in point was his final film, The Other Side of the Wind, which took 48 years to complete. It will finally…

EXCLUSIVE: Bharat Nalluri is attached to direct We Interrupt This Program, a drama financed by Echo Lake Entertainment that focuses on the internal battles between Orson Welles and producer John Houseman that nearly derailed the shocking radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938. Without identifying they were…