If film is a language, Kane is its dictionary

Rating: 10/10 (23 May 2002)

The first modern feature film, Citizen Kane cemented a half-century's worth of prior film innovations into a single narrative that provided the template for every film to follow it. It remains the high watermark for efficient, integrated visual storytelling even 60 years later, providing the ruler by which all other films are measured.
Even if its daring visual innovation and technical mastery weren't enough, it also tells a complex, multi-layered and quintessentially American story that turned traditional film narrative on its head, and reveals new depths which each viewing. The much-misunderstood ending is amoung the greatest in cinema, a suggestion that perhaps there was no hope for the charismatic Kane after all.