It's All True (1994)

Most of this Orson Welles lost masterpiece is a nearly hour-long reconstruction of the unfinished ''Four Men on a Raft,'' an episode the director shot in Brazil for an ill-fated documentary. Prefaced on It's All True by a half hour of interviews with participants who recall the project's slide into disaster, ''Raft'' — the chronicle of a daring voyage by a group of poverty-stricken seamen — is an impressive piece of work that's beautifully conceived and photographed and often quite moving. It's scarcely Welles' most original concoction, overflowing as it is with echoes of F.W. Murnau's Tabu and Eisenstein's similarly doomed Que Viva Mexico. Since minor Welles is better than ''major'' anything else, though, there's not much to complain about here. A-

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