There is no-one better on Orson Welles than Orson Welles. Across numerous archive clips employed in this polished biography of cinema’s wayward genius, that honeyed voice purrs and pontificates on his favourite subject — himself. He and Hollywood made a terrible marriage, he confesses. “But what could I do? I was in love!”
If director Chuck Workman maps a familiar rise and fall of rule-breaking brilliance and ill-starred defiance, it is vindicated not only by the great raconteur but in-depth praise from Spielberg, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Linklater, biographer Simon Callow, Orson’s offspring, Wellsian scholars, and the suitably iconoclastic view that his best film is Chimes At Midnight, not Citizen Kane.