Metacritic-Rezensionen

The movie intersperses observations and speculations on Welles’s life and work with long looks at his graphic pieces. These are fascinating.

The Eyes of Orson Welles honors the central paradox of Welles: that he was a joyful poet of alienation who was, like most of us, both victim and victimizer.

If you can say nothing else about this free-form valentine, it’s genuinely eye-opening.

Considering the amount of such material Welles left behind — sketches, drawings and paintings from his formative childhood travels through decades in movies — it makes for a tantalizing reappraisal sure to appeal to even the most knowledgeable Welles enthusiast.

The Eyes of Orson Welles doesn't rank with the best Welles scholarship, mainly because it's too overreaching and disorganized, and commits itself to central creative decisions that increasingly come to seem misguided.

Early in the documentary The Eyes of Orson Welles, a box is taken out of long years of archival storage at the University of Michigan and opened to reveal an entire alternate career: pages upon pages of Welles’s graphic artwork. For this, Mark Cousins’s documentary is necessary viewing. For the glutinous narrative voice-over of Cousins himself, it’s decidedly less so.

Cousins’ new doc will undoubtedly be essential viewing for a sea of cinephiles, but it might not easily capture the attention of audiences less familiar with Welles’ legacy.