Time Out

For all its nods, winks and witty asides, it’s a richly personal work, picking over the questions every creative artist must eventually ask: Am I ‘for real’? Does it matter? And what is all this work worth, anyway?

Slant Magazine

F for Fake is one of the more wistfully humorous of Welles’s wrestlings with reality. Roguishly comic yet profoundly bittersweet and edited in seizures with a deliberate, manic grace, the film represents the most flamboyant of its director’s magical acts, with Welles himself acting on screen as the narrator/conjuror, pulling the curtain back again and again, each time only to reveal another stage and another curtain in a series of dizzyingly self-reflexive meditations on fakery.

CineVue by Christopher Machell

F for Fake is a sometimes maddening, always brilliant disruption of the conventional documentary.

The A.V. Club by Nathan Rabin

A loving tribute to chicanery, deception, misdirection, scoundrels, sleight of hand, con artistry, dishonesty, and flimflammery in all its myriad guises. It is, in other words, a valentine to filmmaking in general, and its larger-than-life creator in particular.

Slant Magazine by Josh Vasquez

F for Fake is one of the more wistfully humorous of Welles’s wrestlings with reality. Roguishly comic yet profoundly bittersweet and edited in seizures with a deliberate, manic grace, the film represents the most flamboyant of its director’s magical acts, with Welles himself acting on screen as the narrator/conjuror, pulling the curtain back again and again, each time only to reveal another stage and another curtain in a series of dizzyingly self-reflexive meditations on fakery.

Time Out by Staff (Not Credited)

For all its nods, winks and witty asides, it’s a richly personal work, picking over the questions every creative artist must eventually ask: Am I ‘for real’? Does it matter? And what is all this work worth, anyway?

Austin Chronicle by Spencer Parsons

A one-of-a-kind essay centered on art forgery and hoaxes that is built from spare parts, questionable coverage, obvious overdubbing, and outright bluff, 'F for Fake' is a masterwork most often hailed for its hijacking of documentary form to tease cinema's capacity for making truth out of bullshit

TV Guide Magazine by Staff (Not Credited)

One of the most inventive and invigorating nonfiction features ever made.

The New Yorker by Richard Brody

A masterwork of montage, a breathlessly frenzied collage of disparate sources that conjure the unholy tempest of a great man and a great mind at full gallop.

The Telegraph by Robbie Collin

Thirty-nine years on, it’s as vivacious as ever.

The New York Times by Vincent Canby

A charming, witty meditation upon fakery, forgery, swindling and art, a movie that may itself be its own Exhibit A.

Variety by Staff (Not Credited)

Orson Welles has reworked the docu material of Francois Reichenbach on noted art forger Elmyr De Houry, made for TV about 1968, into an intriguing, enjoyable look at illusion in general and his own, Clifford Irving’s and De Houry’s dealing with it in particular.

Total Film by Kevin Harley

The greatest trick he pulls is making you think he’s not genuine: beneath befuddling, bracing digressions on Picasso, Howard Hughes, biography, confidence tricks, growing beards and “girl-watching” lies a searching interrogation of ideas of authorship.

The Dissolve by Keith Phipps

The film plays like the work of a creator trying to grapple with the big issues before the clock runs out.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

F for Fake is a minor work in some ways, but there is fascination and poignancy in seeing Welles's elegant retreat into this hall of mirrors.

Empire

Entertaining as hell.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

F For Fake is minor Welles, the master idly tuning his instrument while the concert seems never to start again. But it's engaging and fun, and it's astonishing how easily Welles spins a movie out of next to nothing.