Synopsis
Surrounded by fans and skeptics, grizzled director J.J. "Jake" Hannaford returns from years abroad in Europe to a changed Hollywood, where he attempts to make his innovative comeback film. This film was started in 1970 but never completed during Welles lifetime.
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Cast
- John HustonJ.J. "Jake" Hannaford
- Oja KodarThe Actress
- Peter BogdanovichBrooks Otterlake
- Susan StrasbergJuliette Rich
- Norman FosterBilly Boyle
- Robert RandomOscar "John" Dale
- Lilli PalmerZarah Valeska
- Edmond O'BrienPat Mullins
- Mercedes McCambridgeMaggie Noonan
- Cameron MitchellMatt "Zimmie" Zimmer
Recommendations
- 100
The Telegraph
Its relentless, almost hallucinogenic craziness makes it a hard film to engage with, and the viewer drop-off rate when it launches on Netflix later this year will undoubtedly be steep. But as a mad satire of movie-world tumult, and a furious love letter to the business that made and unmade its maker, it could scarcely be improved. - 100
Screen Daily
It’s a safe bet that many contemporary viewers will find the film confusing, abrasive, pretentious and antediluvian in its sexual politics. But there’s no denying the audacity of Welles’s undertaking, and of the reconstruction project. What can be said with certainty is that this version of Wind is perplexing, sometimes exhausting but never less than fascinating. - 91
The Film Stage
The Other Side of the Wind is not a comeback picture in the sense Touch of Evil was supposed to be. It is a confounding, unsettling, disorienting adieu from a director whose nonconformist and uncompromising vision was decades ahead of his time. - 84
TheWrap
In its barbs and visuals, indie vibe and old-school ambition, inside jabs and outsider artistry, it feels both of its time — when Welles’ cachet straddled an old guard who shunned him and young rebels who worshipped him — and like an acidly spit anecdote about artistic humiliation that still feels relevant. - 83
The Playlist
It is almost impossible, however, to watch Other Side Of The Wind without taking its history into account. That makes the final product uniquely captivating. - 80
The Guardian
This is a crazy, dishevelled, often hilarious film, in which lightning flashes of wit and insight crackle periodically across a plane of tedium. - 80
The Hollywood Reporter
Wellesians will vigorously debate the aesthetic results of this torturously achieved accomplishment but, to the credit of those who, against daunting odds and nearly a half-century's worth of obstacles, arduously pushed this project to completion, the end result feels like a plausible fulfillment of the style Welles himself established for it. - 80
Variety
The Other Side of the Wind, coherent and compelling as it often is, remains an arresting scrapbook of a movie that we no longer have to speculate about. What you’ll still wonder about is the movie it might have been had Welles made it from the start on the grand scale it deserved, so that you didn’t have to feel it’s a dream that, on some level, will forever be locked up in his head.
