Powerful drama, fast paced

Rating: 10/10 (15 October 2015)

Citizen Kane is a great movie, a first of its kind to include a novelistic character arc, depth, scope and technical innovations that hadn't been so successfully directed previously, although given that hundreds of thousands of films were produced throughout the 20th Century, the claim that Kane is the "greatest movie of all time" is just glowing hyperbole.
But is the film really good? Yep. Follows the story of an impoverished child that lucks out with a land deed that makes him a super-wealthy industrialist (a plutocrat, really) and owner of multiple newspapers, he's a media tycoon and philanthropist who's designs for nationwide (global?) power and influence are bought down by the sensationalistic media and personality politics that he himself had made a lions share of his fortune from.
The acting is strong, every scene and sentence either moves the plot forward or develops character - if only Hollywood movies these days could follow these two concepts without digressing into pointless CGI "franchise" movies that infantalize their audience and dazzle them with computer rendered frames that the brain unconsciously recognizes as fake anyway, but besides all that, Kane is a movie about a seemingly real man, and an era: the American century.
I don't subscribe to the notion of American exceptionalism, and am not actually American at all (even if I did live there, I wouldn't consider myself) but the film is really about the birth of a culturally, and economically new power apart from "the old country", with new values, new leaders and new forms of equality and mass media. The film also explores the inherent contradictions and hypocrisies of the new ruling class of the 20th century; Kane goes from being a genuinely useful idealist, to being an obscenely wealthy fool, trying to dignify the lot of the working class (his own social roots) by pushing a music retail clerk and mediocre stage singer to the level of stardom through his own great wealth and media influence. You can see parallels to today's society in every sequence of Citizen Kane, and its worth seeing more than once.