The Lady from Shanghai 1947

Bosley Crowther, New York Times: For a fellow who has as much talent with a camera as Orson Welles and whose powers of pictorial invention are as fluid and as forcible as his, this gentleman certainly has a strange way of marring his films with sloppiness. Read more

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader: The weirdest great movie ever made. Read more

Mark Feeney, Boston Globe: The climax, a shootout in a funhouse hall of mirrors, is one of the bravura sequences in all film, a triumph of hey-look-at-me form over just-the-facts content. Read more

Richard Brody, New Yorker: Welles and Hayworth were married at the time; he gives her closeups of unmatched rapture even while allegorizing his own fate as a free spirit caught in the trap of Hollywood's delusional pleasure dome. Read more

Geoff Andrew, Time Out: Complex, courageous, and utterly compelling. Read more

Tom Huddleston, Time Out: A magnificent mess of switchbacks and revelations, climaxing with one of cinema's most outrageously inventive sequences. Read more

Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out: Be warned: This is a film that collects obsessives. Read more

William Brogdon, Variety: Script is wordy and full of holes which need the plug of taut story telling and more forthright action. Read more

Calum Marsh, Village Voice: For all the violations it suffered, The Lady From Shanghai seems strangely coherent in its extant form -- or rather, coherently incoherent, and in a way that seems quite deliberate. Read more