While this roustabout story about Herman Mankiewicz’s battle to write the Orson Welles classic is clearly impressed with itself, Mank is easily David Fincher’s best work since Zodiac.
Remember the pre-CGI visual beauty of Fantasia? Fischinger, who also worked with Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, among others, invented the "lumigraph" (a machine for "playing" colors on screen). This guy should be put on a stamp.
For Welles, the director is "the man who presides over accidents but doesn't make them" and never were there more accidents over which to preside for Welles than in Othello.
Dave Kehr is one of the best long-form essay writers people read for clear and sometimes brutally honest indictments of film.
David Bordwell effectively argues that the change in the era of bold, different, sometimes difficult films from the '40s made a permanent mark of cinematic storytelling that resonates to this day.
