I’m begging my readers’ Thanksgiving indulgence, but if there’s anything I’m thankful for as an avid movie buff, it’s the recent online release of one of Orson Welles’ long-unfinished films, “The Other Side of the Wind.”

I’ve long identified with the big man on a personal level, and not just because of our shared outsized appetites. Welles was a child prodigy with a lifelong affinity for stage magic, and one could argue that even his most esteemed acting and directing exploits were merely extensions of his stage magician’s instincts.

The two greatest enemies of Welles’ output during the later years of his cinematic career were his uncompromising perfectionism and his abject lack of financing, which is why filming started on “The Other Side of the Wind” in 1970 and didn’t end until 1976, and even then, Welles wasn’t able to hash out the raw footage into a form that suited him before his death in 1985.

Fortunately, Peter Bogdanovich, an accomplished actor and director in his own right, returned to his roots as Welles’ faithful disciple, and he was finally able to help finish assembling “The Other Side of the Wind” into an actual film.

The reason all this behind-the-scenes backstory is relevant to a review of this film is because “The Other Side of the Wind” is about an auteur filmmaker, J.J. “Jake” Hannaford — played by John Huston, yet another acclaimed actor-director in real life — struggling to complete his own film, which is also titled “The Other Side of the Wind.”

“The Other Side of the Wind,” then, is a film that’s largely about its own making, complete with a young Bogdanovich playing Brooks Otterlake, who is as much of a puppy-dog protege to Hannaford as Bogdanovich himself was accused of being to Welles.

The film is presented as a collection of found footage, shot by various journalists and aspiring filmmakers during the freewheeling celebrations of Hannaford’s birthday, putting Welles on the bleeding edge of the future yet again, anticipating an era of ever-present cellphone cameras.

Welles rewards repeat viewings here, because the supporting cast of characters is introduced in a rush, and by the time they’ve all migrated from the film set to Hannaford’s house, Welles has adeptly re-created the feeling of navigating a dinner party filled with luminaries while being at least half-drunk.

For those who have followed Welles’ career, the Easter eggs come from spotting all the members of his recurring retinue of performers, all essentially playing themselves, just as Hannaford, who’s obviously Welles’ sendup of overtly macho media icons like Ernest Hemingway, also is an unsparing critique of auteur filmmakers as a whole, including Welles himself.

The film’s opening titles note that, before he started shooting “The Other Side of the Wind,” Welles had been in “exile” from Hollywood since the 1950s, and it’s hard not to view “The Other Side of the Wind” as Welles dramatically burning the last of his bridges with the old studios he hated so much.

From the way he portrays everyone involved in the Hollywood filmmaking process, from the film critics (Susan Strasberg is pretty transparently playing a stand-in for Pauline Kael, with whom Welles had been feuding publicly at the time) to the has-beens and also-rans — look for glimpses of Dennis Hopper, Rich Little and Cameron Crowe among the party guests — Welles was not looking to flatter anyone, least of all himself.

With his barbed wire eyebrows, flinty eyes, jaggedly sinister smile and throaty bullfrog croak of a voice, John Huston projects an ever-present air of looming menace as Jake Hannaford, a half-mad Zeus-like sky-father of a director whose moods have a dangerously mercurial edge, which makes for a pretty telling confession from Welles of his own controlling and self-sabotaging nature.

Hannaford’s closest remaining friendship is one of codependent resentment with the toadying Otterlake, whose own career has been sublimated into serving as Hannaford’s chronicler, and it’s both touching and sad that Otterlake is the only one in whom Hannaford can confide what everyone else is already whispering, to wit:

Hannaford’s film has no real script, beyond storyboards; it has no lead actor, ever since his leading man walked off set; and as of that afternoon, it lost its funding.

All this comes after even Hannaford’s crew of reprobate hangers-on concede he doesn’t know what’s “hip” with “the kids” anymore, and indeed, what we see of his film-within-the-film resembles nothing so much as an old man playing at emulating what might have been avant grade a decade earlier.

Welles was no stranger to critical self-examination. Even “Citizen Kane,” which William Randolph Hearst accurately regarded as an attack on him personally, based at least as much of its title character on Welles in his youth.

But when Hannaford acknowledges his winning streak of a career appears to be coming to a crashing halt, it feels like Welles, veteran stage magician that he was, is turning his pockets inside out to show the audience that he has no more magic tricks left.

Even before he spent the latter half of his life hustling money for risky film projects, Welles loved con-men, forgers and grifters, so much so that he made the documentary “F For Fake” in 1973, which itself hoodwinks its audience, so “The Other Side of the Wind” constitutes a shocking admission from a man who was otherwise so committed to the con.

Intriguingly, Welles’ real-life partner and “F For Fake” cast member, Oja Kodar, not only co-wrote “The Other Side of the Wind” with Welles, but also appears as the unnamed actress who serves as the female lead for Hannaford’s film-within-the-film, his Mona Lisa muse who never utters a word on screen.

Welles frequently recounted how he and Hemingway first met and got into a fist fight after Welles deliberately stoked Hemingway’s homophobia. This makes its way into “The Other Side of the Wind” when Hannaford says of Hemingway, “That left hook of his was overrated.” But Kodar was the one who’d already written a story about a masculine director who seeks to possess the male energy of his leading men.

This is a time capsule of film history and the talent of a lost titan. Even 33 years dead, Orson Welles is still making better films than most living directors. If you care at all for cinema as an art form, treat yourselves.