Synopsis
Documents the lives of infamous fakers Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. De Hory, who later committed suicide to avoid more prison time, made his name by selling forged works of art by painters like Picasso and Matisse. Irving was infamous for writing a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. Welles moves between documentary and fiction as he examines the fundamental elements of fraud and the people who commit fraud at the expense of others.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Orson WellesSelf
- Oja KodarThe Girl
- Elmyr de HorySelf
- Clifford IrvingSelf
- Laurence HarveySelf
- Edith IrvingSelf
- David WalshSelf
- Paul StewartSelf
- Richard WilsonSelf
- Joseph CottenSelf
Recommendations
- 100
Slant Magazine
F for Fake is one of the more wistfully humorous of Welles’s wrestlings with reality. Roguishly comic yet profoundly bittersweet and edited in seizures with a deliberate, manic grace, the film represents the most flamboyant of its director’s magical acts, with Welles himself acting on screen as the narrator/conjuror, pulling the curtain back again and again, each time only to reveal another stage and another curtain in a series of dizzyingly self-reflexive meditations on fakery. - 100
The A.V. Club
A loving tribute to chicanery, deception, misdirection, scoundrels, sleight of hand, con artistry, dishonesty, and flimflammery in all its myriad guises. It is, in other words, a valentine to filmmaking in general, and its larger-than-life creator in particular. - 100
CineVue
F for Fake is a sometimes maddening, always brilliant disruption of the conventional documentary. - 100
Time Out
For all its nods, winks and witty asides, it’s a richly personal work, picking over the questions every creative artist must eventually ask: Am I ‘for real’? Does it matter? And what is all this work worth, anyway? - 90
The New York Times
A charming, witty meditation upon fakery, forgery, swindling and art, a movie that may itself be its own Exhibit A. - 80
Empire
Entertaining as hell. - 80
The Guardian
F for Fake is a minor work in some ways, but there is fascination and poignancy in seeing Welles's elegant retreat into this hall of mirrors. - 80
The Dissolve
The film plays like the work of a creator trying to grapple with the big issues before the clock runs out.
