One of the most charismatic performances of all time

Rating: 9/10 (19 June 2008)

As a teenager, I saw a copy of this movie in a video store and seeing as the jacket sleeve had some high praise for this movie, I watched it. It's hard to say how my perceptions of this movie may have been influenced by the blurb on the VHS cover.
The start of this old black and white movie is quite disorientating-a newsreel tells of the death of a powerful media tycoon in the US. You wonder if you have gotten the right movie, or the movie is something different to what you thought it would be.
Soon, you get a more conventional narrative movie-the story of the tycoon in question...the Kane of the title. One of the hooks of the movie is the whole "what does 'Rosebud' mean?" aspect of the story. It was Kane's last words before he died, and it nags away at you until it is resolved towards the end of the movie (pay attention to the movie for the resolution of this aspect of the myster!). Many years later I found out that the word "rosebud" has a whole OTHER connotation, to do with a REAL media tycoon whom this movie was loosely based on (there is a documentary concerning this real tycoon's attempts to shut down the making/screening of this movie).
If you've done Media Studies, you might have had to watch this movie and there you learn about all the technical achievements of this movie. That's all fine, but this movie has a narrative and performance charm all of its own.
A scene from this movie is one of my all time favourites from any movie-it's the scene where a hugely charismatic Kane (as played by the youngish Orson Welles) outlines how long his business can stay afloat for despite incurring losses. This is a brash, lovable, charismatic American character. Great scene-alongside say, one scene with Robert de Niro in the otherwise mediocre Mean Streets, or that of Noah Taylor in "He died with a felafel in his hand". All these have a great scene where their character reveals themselves, emotionally speaking.
Many other scenes from this movie will leave an impression with you.
A movie about power and love.