If you want mindless entertainment, watch Freddy vs Jason. If you enjoy thinking in exchange for your entertainment, then you will agree: Citizen Kane is the Greatest Film Ever Made.

Rating: 10/10 (21 January 2004)

I get really annoyed at some of the reviews written here because many of the reviewers seem to be writing with some vendetta in mind. They are upset that they did not find a fast-paced but mindless excursion into programmed entertainment. Citizen Kane is not slow, it is not melodramatic, it is not pointless, and the expiration date has not passed. Citizen Kane is quite simply a masterpiece of FILM making.
Every word and every gesture of the actors, every pan and zoom by the camera, every note of score, every prop in every scene, every visual focus in a frame, the timing of every edit, or to be quite exact, EVERYTHING in this film fits, has purpose and moves you to the goal of the film: telling a story with all the subtleties true to real life through celluloid.
The viewer of Citizen Kane has got to be ready to watch a film, ready to note subtleties as well as blatant story line pieces, ready to think and put together all the parts of this movie to achieve an understanding of its greatness.
I would recommend this movie to anyone serious about film, as I would recommend Georgia O'Keeffe to someone who was serious about 20th century art. If you seriously want to understand film and seriously want to understand life and the world, you need to have an open mind and a mind ready to place itself in the context of whatever you are viewing.
You might scoff at this film, but if you do, you show your narrow-mindedness and your intolerance of expression. In my opinion this is the Greatest Film Ever Made, and at the rate of film making (or should I say mass-producing?) today, it will have no problem keeping that title well in to the foreseeable future.