It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

As a hardcore 70s film buff I really wanted to like this 7.8 rated film by a master, Orson Welles. Unfortunately, there is really nothing here, it's just a complex editing job that initially seems interesting but in the end is tedious. You can sort of listen to the narration and be intrigued, and the editing was painstakingly handled, but again, there is nothing much going on here. I consider this simply a curiosity for 70s film fans or Orson Wells completists. For everyone else, move along.

"F for Fake" is a documentary by Orson Welles, who thought this movie had commercial prospects. Welles had a tough time in his filmmaking life, especially once he went to Europe. He knew art, he knew creativity, he didn't know business. The saddest thing about the book Barbara Leaming wrote about Welles is toward the end, when he has dinner with Steven Spielberg in the hope that Spielberg would help him find a distributor for his latest film. But all Spielberg wanted to do was talk about Citizen Kane. Leaming's recounting of her phone call with Welles is heartbreaking -- a great artist with nowhere to go with his art. Today, had he lived, his films would be widely accepted. His later ones were too out there for American audiences, and I don't think that Steven Spielberg, even if he had tried, could have gotten him a distributor.F for Fake has unusual editing that we wouldn't see again for another 10 years, and that is the remarkable thing about it. It's very ahead of its time. The documentary is about fakes, mainly two big ones: Elmyr de Hory, who could replicate the great art masters such as Modigliani, Picasso, Matisse, etc., and actually sold these works to museums; and the con man extraordinare, Clifford Irving, who wrote a book about de Hory and then wrote a bio of Howard Hughes, based on interviews and meetings with him, none of which had ever taken place.There's a free-wheeling, improvised feeling to this documentary. For me, it ran a bit long and was a little too disjointed. Welles' beautiful girlfriend in his last years, Oja Kodar, is showcased in one story at the end of the film. Welles is a wonderful narrator and guide.Part of Welles' problem, in my humble opinion, is that he hated structure, rebelled against the confines and demands of the studios, and yet needed the discipline in order to finish anything. People say that he couldn't finish anything. He would run out of money and steam. I don't think it's that he didn't want to finish his films. I think he was a rebel with a cause. The cause was filmmaking. The business side? Couldn't handle it.

What is art? What appeals to our senses and informs our worldview? What doesn't? What is considered forgery and how does that relate to artistry? Is there a link and if so, which is more legitimate? These questions and more are what Orson Welles attempts to illuminate in his irrevocable final finished film F for Fake (1973). It's a movie without equal and goes right into the heart and soul of the self-described charlatan of the stage and screen.This film is not a story, nor is it a documentary; it is an essay film, considered the first of its kind. F for Fake is a supposedly true film about falsity that examines the value of forgery to find deeper artistic meanings. It begins with Welles arriving at a train station doing magic tricks for kids, attention drawn on actress Oja Kodar. He makes a promise to the audience, "For the next hour, everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid fact." F for Fake is part autobiography of iconoclast Orson Welles who made a name for himself directing, producing and acting in "The Best Movie Ever Made," Citizen Kane (1941) (perhaps you've heard of it). Yet the film also encapsulates the life's work of Elmyr de Hory, arguably the most infamous art forger to ever live. Over his 71-year lifespan, de Hory had sold over a thousand forgeries to art galleries all around the world. His exploits are chronicled not only in F for Fake but the book Fake by Clifford Irving. As if things weren't strewn enough, the film also expands on Irving who served a prison sentence for attempting to publish an unauthorized "official" biography on billionaire recluse Howard Hughes.Hughes and Pablo Picasso are also in the mix but the film avoids clutter by throwing away a linear narrative in favor of stream of consciousness rumination. The editing jumps playfully from subject to subject while Welles makes the occasional on camera remark. He toys with the presumption of reality and scoffs at the pomposity of words like "art" and "experts". His main subject de Hory shares Welles desire to pull the wall over people's eyes and show that the emperor has no clothes but does so while asserting he had never had the passion to become a true artist. His exchanges with Welles and Irving remind me of the film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) when Michael Caine's character admits, "As a younger man I was a sculptor, a painter, and a musician. There was just one problem: I wasn't very good…I finally came to the frustrating conclusion that I had taste and style, but not talent." Yet all the people exposed in F for Fake do have enormous talent even if that talent is limited to creating fakes and forgeries. de Hory paints a Picasso within minutes then signs it with Welles's signature. Welles produced the "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast which caused a public panic and Irving produced fake letters and recorded hours of fake "interviews" with Howard Hughes. Did they do these things for recognition? Perhaps cash; de Hory does explain he got more money from fakes than his own original works. Likewise Orson Welles explains that the first time he joined a travelling theater show professionally he pretended to be a huge Broadway star to make it in.F for Fake is Welles's "Finnegans Wake" and I dare not try to analyze it anymore. I leave you with a quote from the film that I think captures the point of the film succinctly: "Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much."http://theyservepopcorninhell.blogspot.com

Orson Welles's final completed movie deals with fakery, and in particular with two of the most notorious forgers of the twentieth century. "F is for Fakes" (also called "F for Fake") is not really a movie or documentary as much as a look at how we interpret art, and what we WANT to interpret about anything that is essentially fake. Welles proudly calls himself a charlatan while performing magic tricks and coming up with all sorts of ways to play with the audience. I personally had never heard of Elmyr de Hory until watching this, but Welles turns him into a very interesting person.All in all, the director known as a boy genius had a fine end to his career. Welles created a truly mind-bending look at the concept of art. The fact that the movie came out around the time that Clifford Irving's scandal broke (he wrote a forged biography of Howard Hughes) certainly adds to the documentary's quality. Can there truly be any more definite reality left in the world?