The return of Orson Welles

ORSON WELLES' DEBUT FILM, CITIZEN KANE, is widely hailed by critics and filmmakers as the best film of all time. In a poll conducted every 10 years by the British Film Institute, the 1941 black-and-white film topped the Sight & Sound best-of list for 50 years, from 1962 to 2012. Only in 2012 did it lose the prime spot to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, tumbling to No. 2.

When Netflix announced earlier this year that it was debuting Welles' new film The Other Side Of The Wind 33 years after his death, it was a momentous occasion. It's like discovering a fourth film in the original Star Wars trilogy of the 1970s and 1980s before the franchise soured, or a long lost novel by Junichiro Tanizaki or Yukio Mishima. The cultural impact seemed substantial, if not enormous.

When Welles died of heart attack in 1985, he left behind several films that were not completed. The Other Side Of Wind was filmed between 1970 and 1976, but Welles couldn't get the funding to finish it. When the American Film Institute presented Welles with the Life Achievement Award in 1975, he used the high-profile televised event to all but beg the audience to help him find "end money". He even took a moment to show a clip of The Other Side Of The Wind to convince them - but to no avail.