Me and Orson Welles: Critic Reviews

The story of a teenager's sometimes uncomfortable brush with greatness, it is necessary viewing for anyone whose imagination has been seduced by the charms of art.

As so often with films reverently dealing with theatre folk, the directing itself becomes exasperatingly theatrical and inert.

It's slight, only sporadically enjoyable and sometimes corny.

It's an open question as to who, outside theater geeks, will find this inside-baseball approach quite as fascinating as Linklater apparently does.

Deft, affectionate, and unexpectedly enjoyable.

Surprisingly conventional by director Richard Linklater's standards, this pleasant, low-key dramedy is most memorable for the discovery of co-star Christian McKay.

Efron's fix on the period suggests a GPS struggling in a low-signal area, and the movie becomes an affectionate, name-dropping exercise in historical mutilation.

Quippy, fast, and enjoyably corny, Welles is like a musical comedy without songs.

The impersonation of Welles by Christian McKay in Me and Orson Welles is the centerpiece of the film, and from it, all else flows. We can almost accept that this is the Great Man.

A real charmer, Me and Orson Welles is the work of a director who takes nostalgia, romantic possibility and the theater seriously, without being a pill about it.

Linklater's film adaptation succeeds in bringing the flamboyant Welles to life, without resorting to caricature (although a few vintage Al Hirschfelds adorn the walls).

Me and Orson Welles is a little velvet sack of diamonds. It's a sparkling love letter to a gigantic talent, a romance, a comedy, a drama.

A thoroughly enjoyable film that wraps a coming-of-age story around the portrait of a genius.

There are moments, especially when Welles is alternating between acting as Brutus and directing everyone else, that it's possible to forget you're watching an actor and really believe you're beholding Orson Welles at work.

One of the best pictures about the stage in recent memory.

Working with the fact-based eponymous novel by Robert Kaplow, first-time screenwriters Holly Gent Palmo and Vince Palmo are content to follow the contours of a standard behind-the-scenes story about the staging of a play.

The very name Orson Welles stands for genius wasted and betrayed, and the movie offers some foreshadowing of his triumphs and failures to come.

This is a standard coming-of-age story set in a milieu that's anything but standard, and that's what keeps the picture's motor running.

In a departure from his usual intimate, character-based fare, director Richard Linklater paints on a broad cinematic canvas that brings Depression-era Broadway vividly to life.

Christian McKay's impersonation of young Orson Welles is sensational in this enjoyable, though slight, historical fiction about a teen who spends a memorable week with the legendary wonder.

Welles is brilliantly embodied by Christian McKay in one of those, hey-who's-that? performances that tends to draw Oscar talk, even if the film itself isn't much more than an extremely pleasant lark.

What do you say about a movie that proves Zac Efron can act, introduces a master thespian in Christian McKay and launches a charm assault that is damn near irresistible?

As in life, the presence of Welles never fails to overtake things and McKay's command of the subject is so Welles-ian that when he's in a scene everyone else fades a little. And neither [Linklater] nor the film ever quite recover from that.