Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

krocheav Orson Welles hits and runs yet again with this over-everything mess. This fellow wasted his talent by trying to make movies for himself with little regard for the viewing public - who would eventually have to part with their hard earned cash - to sit in picture houses all over the world wondering what could continue to go so awfully wrong. Too often we see raves for this fellows indulgences from other movie makers like Scorsese, Spielberg, Tarantino, and Bogdanovich, they seem to belong to a 'self congratulatory movie club', specialising in a pat-each-other-on-the-back style of praise. If Wells had concentrated on his talents as a performer, director of photography or screenplay adaptor and collaborated with more controlled movie makers (ie; Carol Reed, George Stevens, William Wyler, etc) we may have experienced more masterpieces. Instead, we have a steady rollout of sorry 'could-have-been' or unfinished titles from an eccentric, compulsive egotist. Looking at this movie is an eye-rolling experience many balanced movie lovers will tire of very early - in fact, my audience either slept of walked out. Camera angles for unimportant scenes were so overly staged it detracted from what the scenes simply set out to convey. Less would have been more for any movie maker in control of their project. All this might work for those bent on idolising a fallen one or two hit wonder. Wells seemed bent on destroying his obvious creative giftedness with unregulated egocentric opulence. Little wonder producers were forced to take control of his projects before they were all sent to the poorhouse. If not yet seen, watch it for a mostly excellent cast (except for the main lead!) being wasted within excess overindulgence. For a great movie experience look again at Citizen Kane - then consider that a young Orson, first time movie maker, was blessed with some of the finest creative film talent in the world to teach and carry him over the bumps... Innovative master cinematographer: Gregg Toland ~ brilliant writer: Herman Mankiewicz, assisted by John Houseman ~ experienced first assistant director: Edward Donahue ~ Editor: Robert Wise ~ executive in charge of production: Pandro S. Berman. These people would continue to make successful movies throughout their careers. When Orson distanced himself from the likes of these talented folk and took over the reins himself, it all began to fall over. There are many other master movie makers to honour - who have been quietly cast aside for the sake of relative failures and, this appears to be mostly instigated by others enamoured with their own self importance. Take a closer look and judge for yourself.

Tony Keith This is a film for Orson Wells fans and filmmakers.Don't press the pause button, to go to the frig, or you might not bother to resume play.A cross between Citizen Kane and Joe McDoaks, as in "So you want to be a Private Eye". It tries for meaning, symbolism, and is replete with clownish characters, and some creative camera work, but Fellini it is not.There is, unfortunately, no message. The sound is bad, and the dialogue is pedestrian.It is more like a homework assignment than entertainment, but then, I thought Citizen Kane and The Third Man were grossly overrated too.

Mike P Even the inherent beauty of an Orson Welles film and an interesting story can't overcome bad editing, terrible pacing, sub par acting and an awful dub. The problems start early on when you notice that, what do you know, the dialogue just doesn't really match the lip movements. They're always a bit ahead or a bit behind or just plain off. This is no mere technical gripe--the constant distraction ruined any chance of immersiveness that's so important to Welles' visual style, constantly reminding me that this is "just a movie." A further problem, which is kind of hard to explain in text, is that the lines are not read like dialogue for a movie. Instead, they're read just like a radio show--like there's nothing to pay attention to except whatever the characters are saying. This combined with the frenetic editing results in most of the film being an endless barrage of spoken narration and dialogue with nary a break between lines. It sounds like the actors are trying to get through the script as quickly as humanly possible, and thus the nice acting of many characters is lost because it all sounds so staged. Finally, the acting of two of the leads, Robert Arden and Paula Mori (including whoever dubbed her voice), is terrible. Their characters are supposed to provide a lot of the film's emotion, but they have no chemistry or charisma. Orson Welles himself does a nice job, but constantly seems to be overacting because he's matched against such wooden and cloying performances.The only reason one would watch this, except for being a Welles completist, is for some very beautiful camera-work, but even that is only on display in bursts here and there. And the story, while having a lot of potential, is told in such a haphazard way that it cannot be said to have been realized to any degree. The last quarter of the film in particular includes some actions by both Arkadin and Van Stratten that seem maddeningly incomprehensible, as well as a five-minute-long segment consisting almost entirely of a minor character repeatedly asking for goose liver.I would recommend watching The Lady From Shanghai instead of this for a film with similar themes that works despite even more pronounced attempts by the studio to butcher Welles' work.

theowinthrop CONFIDENTIAL REPORT (or MR. ARKADIN) has (if you look at the background notes) a complex history. It is supposedly based on a novel by Welles, which was actually written by a "ghost" writer, but it was then based on characters and situations from Welles' radio series as Harry Lime (based on the movie by Graham Greene and Sir Carol Reed - THE THIRD MAN), and then it has striking similarities to the basic structure of CITIZEN KANE (a wealthy powerful man is investigated by a reporter). As strip by strip this has been taken apart, older critiques are shown wanting. Peter Cowie's essay on the film in his book THE CINEMA OF ORSON WELLES is a pretty good one, given how poor the film versions were back in the 1970s, but he believed Welles wrote the book. Let's start from a point Cowie brought up - Arkadin may be based on figures like Sir Basil Zaharoff (the munitions dealer, known as "the Merchant of Death). One he mentions was Alfred Loewenstein, who I mentioned referring to two other films (SUCH MEN ARE DANGEROUS and GILDA) due to the interesting way he died - he fell out of his private airplane into the English Channel in 1928, and the exact reasons have never been settled satisfactorily - see the book THE MAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY for the best discussion of the mystery). Thus the plane without a pilot is not as odd an opening as presented (although Loewenstein's staff and pilot were still in the plane when it finally landed). Starting from there the film does look like KANE, except in the exact details. For one thing, Charles Foster Kane died before the reporter is sent to investigate his life - and the scandals that crop up, or failings, or successes are well known to the public. But Kane, for all his failings, is part of the American power circle and social scene. Arkadin is a would-be billionaire too, but he does not make his fortune from mining, real estate, and newspapers, but from dealing with opportunists around the globe (we learn he sold defective military equipment to the Italians in the late 1930s). He has more of a hit-and-run type of approach that Kane (who barely cared for his fortune) never had - at one point he calls up his minions to "Buy Copper", which by the way is not as simplistic an order as one critic suggests (not Cowie) but exactly what someone like Arkadin would say to his minions after discussing the matter with them before.The original KANE screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz had a sequence in which Kane killed a man over Susan Alexander. This was based on the rumor (still debated, possibly unfairly) that William Randolph Hearst shot Thomas Ince on his yacht. Welles took this out of that script except for a bit about Raymond the butler knowing where all the bodies were buried. This is actually an improvement on that script, as Charles Kane's failings don't really seem to include a desire for corpses.Kane's tragedy is that he is desperately trying to be everything to everyone and yet remain his own master. His character is one of the most complex in American films (at least up to 1941 - possibly up to 2007). Arkadin's tragedy is a realization he is a creature of the nightmare world - a scorpion - desperate to make his daughter's world better at all cost. But if he is from the gutter, what if his former associates try to blackmail her? What would she think of him by their revelations? Charley Kane lost his normal growing up when his mother did what she mistakenly thought was smart: take him away from his drunken father and give him all the warmth of Thatcher's bank. Gregory Arkadin left the slime of the European swamplands for the grandeur of international finance and castles in Spain, and a British Marquis fiancé for his Raina, always aware that if your base was a swamp you can still fall back into it.So there are differences in the two figures as well as similarities. I first saw ARKADIN in 1973 on late night television. The version I saw apparently was the horribly botched cut version of the distributors in the U.S. in the 1950s where sequences flew about without keeping the rhythm of the film or it's sound track in tact (best example: this version has Van Stratton trying to get information out of Oscar (O'Brady - Sophie's husband) while denying him drugs on a boat - but we are shown the latter before we see the boat where this is going on!). I was impressed at sequences with Mischa Auer and Michael Redgrave, and that was about it. Since then more complete versions have turned up on video which make more sense. It's not in the front rank of Welles' best (KANE, AMBERSOMS, MACBETH, OTHELLO, CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, TOUCH OF EVIL - maybe THE TRIAL) but it holds up as well as say LADY FROM SHANGHAI or THE STRANGER. The worst thing is the vagueness of the sound, (a problem of all of Welles' independent productions in Europe). I think it is definitely worth watching, but certainly not in that grotesque 1950s American version.