Very well made movie, great acting, but out of the more than 2 hour runtime I cared about the story for about 20 minutes. A lot of effort went into this, could have been about something a bit more interesting

I really hate to say but this movie was an absolute chore to watch for me. This should have been a movie that I enjoyed. I love older films and I love learning the history about the production of films but Jesus h Christ this was boring. First I will say that this movie is a technical masterpiece. It is so carefully crafted and well made that it honestly could have been made in the 40s. It looks and sounds so much like them old films. I have seen other films try and capture that old Hollywood essence before and they tend to just flop but this really understands that era and is just a marvel. I definitely think it deserves nominations for sound and cinematography. But that is kind of where it stopped for me. The story is just an incoherent mess and is just so sluggish. I think the writer thinks Mank was a much more interesting person than I do. Speaking of the writer, it is The directors father and I think that was an issue. It's lovely that he wanted to make this film that his dad wrote and honer him that way but I think it sort of blinded him to the dullness and messiness of this script. The film structure is sort of a parallel to Citizen Kane with its use of flashbacks to tell the story but it just gets jumbled up in scenes of nothingness. The acting is pretty good but the actors don't get to do a lot with these characters. You may like it if you enjoy old movies and know a lot about that time. You could get enjoyment out of spotting references or people from that time but I don't know I just found it so dull and I really wanted to enjoy it.

Much as I wanted to like this film, I didn't. Even if I love B&M movies of the 40s, sharp dialogues and I watched Citizen Kane at least three times. I liked the photography playing a tribute to Citizen Kane, with dark, cavernous, sinister settings and also the few moments when Tom Burke (as Orson Welles) was on screen, which was not often enough. We're supposed to believe that drunkard Herman Mankiewicz, brother of the more famous and accomplished Joseph, was actually the only scriptwriter genius behind C.K. The plot twist is that Mank used to be an entertaining figure in Randolph Hearst entourage, but the relationship turned sour and Mank wrote Citizen Kane as a revenge. Mank had a reputation as a witty man, but none of his scripts were successful and his career was second rate. However in Fincher's version, Mank takes center stage and writes the Oscar-winning script while recovering from an accident and temporarily drying out. The story is told in innumerable flashbacks from which you gather Mank was a resentful drunk who unleashed his sarcasm on everybody and thought he was entitled to a better career. Unfortunately, he seems moved only by envy and I felt no sympathy. Besides the occasional sparkle, since most characters in the movie are completely forgotten, it's hard to understand fully the circumstances. The only clear things are that Mank himself did not deserve a whole movie and 2/3 of this are a snooze-feast.