Critics - I'ts A Gas

Orson Welles’s posthumously finished The Other Side of the Wind is a meta-masterpiece.

- David Edelstein

ORSON WELLES FAMOUSLY hated it when critics tried to draw clean lines between his work and his tempestuous inner life, but here goes, anyway: It wasn’t mere bad luck that he died with his self-eviscerating/self-aggrandizing semi autobiographical summing up, The Other Side of the Wind, in fragments. It was destiny— another, more cosmic, summing up. It was How It Had to Be.

The movie that arrives on November 2 (in theaters and on Netflix, which coughed up the bucks to pry loose the estimated 100 hours of footage from interested parties) is a jaw-dropping bombardment—a teeming, fractured faux documentary of the last day (principally, a 70th-birthday party at an actress’s desert estate) in the life of a madly self-indulgent director, J. J. “Jake” Hannaford (John Huston), intercut with scenes from the film he’s working on and will never have the money to finish, also called The Other Side of the Wind and meant (by Welles, not Jake) as a parody of Antonioni’s lush sex-and-alienation epics.