Very definitely massively overrated, but still fairly good

Rating: 6/10 (17 July 2016)

It's Orson Welles. The pseudo-intellectuals, especially nowadays with the immense classic status this film has cropped over the decades, will put this sort of film in the highest order of things simply because it's Orson Welles, the great American iconoclast cinematic intellectual of the time with this highly critical piece of film.
Now, for the film itself, it's fairly good, but lacks in various places. Sure there's criticism of the society of the time, there's criticism about politics and more largely criticism of the individual ego, the vanity of men; the ending is authentic and the whole movie works in one direction and has coherence to its lore; and all of that is fine; but ultimately one could find it content-wise the film isn't the most entertaining, a common fault of Welles', that it seems it is the *narrative* of the film that takes the place of ...the film itself. It's like the film has to go through a painful bulk at the center, tediously going through a logical development of the situation and plot, before it can finally give the ending away. Some parts are too long for their own good, for their own point to be made (the whole opera singing thing), and overall one gets an impression of non-interactive coldness, blandness; as a lot of the early events just aren't very interesting (the newspaper days..). There isn't enough surprise, tension, dynamic content; Citizen Kane takes its sweet time to get to the not unpredictable or particularly subtle places it chooses to go; the film just lets its story casually played out and the conclusions are quite obvious (though rather good) even for the time. I understand cinematographically this is a strong and important film, but as a film in itself or even for the point it's making, it's not top notch.