Orson Welles's epic tale of a publishing tycoon's rise and fall

Rating: 10/10 (26 February 2019)

The Orson Welles film is generally considered the greatest American film of the sound period, and it may be more fun than any other great movie.

Citizen Kane...has the best of everything: a great director and star, innovative cinematography, dreamlike - even nightmarish - art direction, a sonorous musical score, a skillful screenplay in which comic passages intensify the movie's tragic qualities by means of their grotesque juxtaposition (how lifelike!), a psychological / narrative form that predates our contemporary "psycho-histories" by at least 40 years, and best of all, a memorial word that, when spoken, recalls the film out of thin air.