Recensioni de* critic*

"Mank" is an embellished story about an industry whose entire raison d’etre is in telling embellished stories... If this all sounds a little too self-indulgent even for Hollywood in the midst of awards seasons, then fear not. "Mank" is also and primarily a gorgeous, entertaining and occasionally even captivating motion picture.

"Mank" is ostensibly about writing. But in fact, as a piece of film-making, it’s perhaps more helpful to think in terms of performance. This is film-making as role-playing, which has immersed itself, method-style, in a past era and aesthetic, which wears its luminous black-and-white cinematography like a costume.

"Mank" is a movie about fake news(reels), economic devastation, and an election in which an idealistic socialist candidate gets Red-baited into submission by the misinformation-wielding wealthy and influential. It doesn’t overreach for present-day resonance, and it doesn’t need to — but, boy, is it a drag getting to those (or any) stakes.

["Mank"] is, in some ways, an inert cinematic object, lacking a dramatic spark. But its subject is fascinating, and its view of classic Hollywood is so personal, and passionately conflicted, that what takes place onscreen feels secondary to what it reveals of Fincher’s own directorial psychology—of his view of the business and the art of movies, and of his place in both.

Whatever it is, “Mank” is not, as several have proclaimed, a “love letter” to old Hollywood, or to the movies themselves, and I can’t fathom why anyone would think so. The movie capital of the United States depicted here is one where almost nobody is happy in their work, or proud of it for that matter.

Impressions of people and incidents are all that this immaculately produced and beautifully acted film ultimately has to offer.

["Mank"] is ultimately not a writer’s revenge or even a lament, at least not about screenwriting in particular. Fincher’s movie about movies seems to be about attempting to work within a system that’s encompassing enough to impose itself on fantasies and reality alike

What "Mank" suggests is that daring to take movies (and, by extension, TV) seriously, and seeing them for the cultural bellwether they are, requires some courage and perhaps a bit of recklessness. There’s no guarantee that your efforts will be rewarded. Never mind. It is work worth doing.

David Fincher’s “Mank” is a worthy, eminently watchable entry in the annals of Hollywood self-obsession... Most of its characters are verifiably real figures — including famous and half-forgotten directors, screenwriters, stars and studio bosses — but they are embedded in a spectacle that shimmers with knowing artificiality.

"Mank," though lusciously framed by cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt in black and white, doesn’t feel like much of a love letter to Hollywood. It’s more an indictment of its hypocrisies – exactly the kind of wise but cynical film a director of Fincher’s standing might make.

“Mank” gleefully examines the disreputable underside of old-school Hollywood and its minions: the spit under the polish, the dreck that undergirds the dreams. But it’s weighed down by windy expository passages that stop the film in its tracks... [and] it’s questionable whether any of the fuss will appeal to anyone but the most dedicated “Citizen Kane” fans.

The whole movie, indeed, has an air of this-then-that, in lieu of a plot, and we are left to work out how, or if, the pieces lock together... ["Mank"] is a story of a story, and, for all its great beauty, it winds up chasing its own tale.