The Other Side of the Wind

Jake Hannaford, an ageing director, is trying to finish the film he has returned to make, and the crowd gathering at his house for his birthday has come to admire him and to call him to account. The film runs on two layers: the record of the party and sections from Hannaford's unfinished picture. Orson Welles began the project in 1970, shot for six years, and could never complete it for legal and financial reasons; thirty-three years after his death it was assembled from the surviving material with Netflix's backing. John Huston plays Hannaford. The cutting is deliberately fragmentary, the formats keep changing, and the film mocks both the collapse of Hollywood and the new European cinema. Who it is for: viewers interested in Welles and in films about filmmaking. Who it is not for: anyone wanting an orderly narrative, since this is chaotic by design.