Orson Welles (1915-1985) was a Broadway and Hollywood actor, radio actor, and film director. His earliest film production, Citizen Kane, was his most famous, although most of his other productions were notable. Orson Welles was born George Orson Welles...

Considered an artistic genius, Orson Welles was involved in productions for radio, theatre, film, and television in a career spanning more than forty years. He was found to be exceptional as a child--reading at age two, playing Igor Stravinsky's music...

Considered by many to be the most influential and innovative filmmaker of the twentieth century, Orson Welles made movies that were ambitious, original, and epic. This alone would qualify him as a popular culture icon. But add to his genius his...

When Orson Welles's name is mentioned, the first thing that comes to mind is Citizen Kane (1941), which is still considered to be one of the best films in the history of motion pictures. However, Welles's "show business"...

George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an Academy Award-winning American director, writer, actor and producer for film, stage, radio and television. Welles first gained wide notoriety for his October 30, 1938 radio broadcast of H. G....

While it's not official, we have it on good authority that the Orson Welles Cinema will return from the ashes. Plans are afoot to re-establish the legendary moviehouse behind One Kendall Square in Cambridge. The new six-screen cinema hopes to open in late September....

Introduction: Orson Welles and Shakespeare on Film Unabridged? Never! I cut, cut, cut, oh yes. (1) Yes. Of course, there's nothing can be done without Shakespeare--you can't put a play on the screen. I don't believe in that--I don't think Shakespeare...

The new "Transformers" movie boasts a good cast, but it's got nothing on the original.In a classic bit of movie trivia, the little-seen 1986 animated film "Transformers: The Movie" was Orson Welles' last film. Yes, that Orson Welles.The filmmaking legend who remade cinema with "Citizen...

Emilio Ruiz del Rio, the award-winning Spanish set decorator and visual and special effects wizard who worked on such films as "Dr. Zhivago," "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Pan's Labyrinth," has died, a hospital official said Sunday. He was 84.Ruiz del Rio died of respiratory failure...

Judged by first—even second or third—impressions, Welles's films are a triumph of show over substance. His most memorable images seem like elephantine labors to bring forth mouse-size ideas. His films bulge with preposterously vast spaces: the echoing halls of Kane's Xanadu; the rambling castles of Macbeth, Othello, and Arkadin; the vertiginous offices of The Trial; the cathedral-like palace and tavern of Falstaff.

[Welles's] personality as an artist is on the scale of a Hugo, a Balzac: he is expansive, grand, capricious, sometimes gross in his style; maddeningly prone to dissipate his energies; baroque and Gothic by turns; romantic, journalistic, slapdash, and brilliant. Citizen Kane remains his masterpiece, as the world has said; but many who thought his a tragedy without a third act, a story of a genius burned out, have been proven wrong. In Chimes at Midnight—that tender elegy to the vanished past of...

[Though] I expected The Trial to be bad, I went to it truly hoping for the best. And, in fact, though I expected it to be bad, bad as a mannerist painting can be bad, bad, for instance, as Welles's Othello is bad, I had not been expecting the worst; I had not expected that it might be boring. Orson Welles boring! And boring to stupefaction. (p. 162) It is possible, perhaps, to dismiss Citizen Kane as little more than a bag of tricks, good tricks but tricks nonetheless; yet, although much of that film...