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It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

As a hardcore 70s film buff I really wanted to like this 7.8 rated film by a master, Orson Welles. Unfortunately, there is really nothing here, it's just a complex editing job that initially seems interesting but in the end is tedious. You can sort of listen to the narration and be intrigued, and the editing was painstakingly handled, but again, there is nothing much going on here. I consider this simply a curiosity for 70s film fans or Orson Wells completists. For everyone else, move along.

If you like Orson Welles -- the man and the voice -- you'll love this. He wanders through this documentary in his black cape and wide-brimmed hat, puffing on a colossal cigar, using his walking stick as a lecturer's pointer, and reciting the writers' lines, and some quotes from Kipling, in that mellifluous, sonorous baritone. He sounds like a stage hypnotist. He even gets to demonstrate some of his magic, making bodies disappear (through phony photography). He's a complete fake. He admits it freely and he's utterly charming.Substantively, the chief subject is Elmyr de Hory. He's a big fake too, a Hungarian gnome whose own painting failed to sell, so he took to more or less expertly copying the works of the masters -- Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, practically anybody. He can dash off a Bernard Buffet in the blink of an eye and then cheerfully burn it in the fireplace. He spent a little time in jail but, as he insists, he was "interned" over some passport dispute, not doing time as a prisoner. As of the time of filming, de Hory lives in a mansion on Ibiza overlooking the Mediterranean. He speaks several languages, hosts international celebrities at lavish parties. But he mourns that he's only renting this palace. He doesn't own it. He has hardly a penny.Does he blame himself for having blatantly defrauded innumerable museums and art collectors? Like hell. To hear de Hory tell it, he was performing a public service. Man, did he teach those so-called art experts a lesson in humility. He ought to get a medal.Less time is given over to other frauds, sometimes in a confusing manner. Clifford Irving -- who is by now mostly forgotten -- shows up as a de Hory admirer on the periphery. Irving did a biography of de Hory. I don't know if the art experts learned anything from de Hory but Clifford Irving certainly did. Irving cooked up a fake autobiography of billionaire Howard Hughes and got caught. You can catch Richard Gere giving a fake sympathetic portrait of Clifford Irving in "The Hoax." Also present are some other frauds, including Oja Kodar, a beautiful young woman who was Picasso's mistress and model during his last years. He pained some twenty portraits of her, most unrecognizable. She convinced him that the portraits should be hers and kept private. Picasso agreed and shortly after Kodar left, she was raking in the shekels by showing them in movable displays. At least that's the impression I got. It was all a little murky, like the fake fog in which Kodar herself is enveloped on screen.The general point being made, I think, is that the world is full of deceit -- in and out of the snobbish art world. Well, that's unarguable. All of us lie all the time, beginning with exchanges like: "How are you today?" "Fine." Every sociologist knows this.But for all the flamboyance of the narration, all the flowery prose, it misses something. Namely, it misses the fact that some fakes are worse than others. De Hory's fakes cost people a lot of money, one way or another. If he wanted to teach the art world a lesson, why didn't he paint a bunch of convincing fakes and display them and sell them for what they really were? His professed motive is as fake as his product. That's not even to get INTO Clifford Irving, the smooth-talking snake-oil salesman who finagled something like a million-dollar advance on his carefully contrived "autobiography" of Hughes. When interviewed about the affair after his conviction, Irving quickly switched his role from "perp" to "vic," carrying on about how his children suffered during his troubles.Of course de Hory is charming, and so is Irving, and so was Bernie Madoff. They MUST be charming if their lies are to be believed. The film left me feeling as I always do when I think about these psychopaths. They shouldn't be living in mansions, they shouldn't be beaming about their accomplishments in a movie. They ought to be in jail.

Where to begin with this strange little film here? Well basically it is just a documentary by famed director Orson Welles. In this documentary, which has been tagged under the style of "free form," Welles discusses fraud and fakery and the role it plays in art. He does this by telling the story a fraudulent painter and his biographer. The painter paints famous paintings that have already been painted by other well known names like Picasso, Matisse, and Da Vinci, signs them using the original painters name and claims they were painted by that painter. He then sells them as if they were originals. His biographer is in on the hoax as well, documenting his life as if he were really a painter. All the while Orson Welles narrates about the profundities of playing tricks on the mind and how we are so easily fooled by tricks that lay right under our noses. He even plays a few tricks of his own on his audience so that the film accumulates into one big allegorical maze. It is head scratchingly fascinating.The structure of this film can be very difficult to get behind as it is very quick and has almost a stream of consciousness type of flow to it. You have to keep up and you have to really take in everything Welles throws at you from start to finish. The movie is only an hour and a half but there are copious amounts of information thrown at you that you must follow to understand it all by the end of the film. Welles does do a fantastic job at putting the film together though and his meticulous nature in editing becomes very evident after the first ten minutes of the film. I'll admit that I wasn't as invested in this film as I probably should have been, thus I got lost a few times but was, for the most part, able to catch back up and understand it by the end.This film is such a strange departure for the norm for Welles. If you are expecting a Citizen Kane type Welles film you will be disappointed. If you are expecting something different than anything you've seen before then you should be very entertained. Welles is having a great time with this film, boasting his profound ingenuity in all things art and human nature. He wants very much to provide a strange and multi layered experience for his audience and he definitely accomplishes that. He knows what he wants to do with this film and he keeps it very lively and mind bending. The films quick pace never lets up and Welles never ceases to narrate the film with the utmost spite and poignancy. This is a film for those who want to think, and think hard.There are a lot of things at the beginning of this film that could put you off from wanting to finish it. The structure, flow, and tone of the film is all very bizarre and takes some effort to adapt to, but once you do you won't regret it. In fact after that point you will be sucked into the film and you will surely have a keen interest in finding out what it is all leading up to. And when you do find this out I guarantee it will put a smile on your face and make you realize just what a profound genius Orson Welles was. He does something so different with F for Fake, so how could you not like it?

that Welles said was that he's been in decline his whole career.There was an interesting story here. Unfortunately, Welles seemed completely incapable of telling it. Instead, he was trying to tell a bunch of different stories, about Elmyr, about Clifford Irving, about his pompous view of critics and experts, oh, yeah, and trying to jump start his current girlfriend's career by giving her unneeded screen time. (Oja, honey, when they told you to sleep with the director, they didn't mean one washed up like a whale on a beach!) Welles was probably trying to cash in with a bunch of footage of Clifford Irving as Irving was becoming a household name with his role in the faked auto-biography of Howard Hughes. Unfortunately, it means the subject of his film, Elmyr, didn't get the time he deserved and he was probably the more interesting story.The great tragedy of Orson Welles was that he peaked early, and then spent the rest of his career sputtering, finally doing wine commercials and awful documentaries...