The reviews are uniformly favourable. Most critics treat the documentary as an act of restoration first and a film second, and praise it on those terms: surviving footage from Welles’s abandoned 1942 Brazilian project, set inside interviews and the story of how the trip went wrong. The praise clusters on one sequence, the near-complete “Four Men on a Raft”, which several critics single out as the reason to see it, and on what the material reveals about how Welles’s style was changing.
The spread is narrow and no review is negative. The reservations concern the frame rather than the footage. The New Yorker finds the mix of travelogue, fable and documentary an odd one, with Welles himself barely on screen. The Independent, the coolest of the seven, admires the fishermen’s footage but argues the assembled version lacks Welles’s rapid cutting and narration and is tamer than it might have been, saving its anger for the studios that sat on the material so long.