Who is popular today?

Gary Oldman plays Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz in Fincher’s stagey, method-style drama
David Fincher’s messy, often brilliant Mank, which follows Hollywood screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) as he wrestles with the screenplay for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, 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.
Related: Mank: a death wish of a movie that could never live up to the legend of Orson Welles | David Thomson Continue reading...