Monstrously talented, monstrously flawed, Orson Welles is brought kicking and screaming to life in this superbly written study. David Thomson knows his movies - he knows how to take a shot apart and put it together piece by painstaking piece before the reader's disbelieving eyes - and he does much the same to his outsized subject without resorting, as the temptation must surely be, to melodramatic flourishes of the pen. What emerges is a rare blend of incisive criticism and persuasive humanity; if Rosebud were a film, it would surely run away with a handful of this year's Oscars.
Arminta Wallace