Citizen Kane

It’s Citizen Kane. What can I say? The thing is, a movie like Psycho was just as influential, but with its twists exposed, it’s tricks copied, and our understanding of mental illness progressed, much of it doesn’t stand up. It’s more interesting as a case study than as a film in its own right. Citizen Kane has the same legacy and influence, but still stands tall.

It’s no wonder Hearst hated this movie. It’s no petty, lazy hit piece. It’s an incisive critique of an American megalomania that Hearst was just one symptom of. It looks at Hearst and men like him as men: sad, lonely, empty men wanting something they can never give themselves or truly accept from others. Welles kills the role. The clapping scene has been oft parodied, and yet it’s lost none of its power. Welles tries to bend the room to his will with his will alone, defiant and petulant in equal measure. His violent meltdown is a scene that’s been followed by many like it, and it’s still enthralling. Even at his youngest and most charming, Welles never loses sight of that unsettling hollowness at Kane’s core. And the rest of the cast follow his lead.

The fade ins and outs are subtle and graceful. The lighting is breathtaking; the room darkening around Susan as she looks off into old memories was one moment that stood out. The set design is immaculate; Kane’s collection at the end feels like an eerie mirror of the city he tried to control from above. It’s sprawling and yet so sparse, so empty. The film breathes ambition and excels confidence, an assurance in what it’s trying to do. It’s a jigsaw puzzle that fits so perfectly, and it doesn’t matter if you already know what Rosebud is. As Thompson says, it’s just one piece of one man. But the whole picture is one you can’t miss.

Let's talk about the timeless masterpiece Citizen Kane is :)

I normally read reviews before going into a black and white movie to either curb my expectations or to increase my expectations. Citizen Kane reviews in particular were mixed, some said it's overrated and people like it just to be seen as a "film bro" and some say it's one of the best movies ever made. I had no idea what to expect and I actually agree with the both negative and the positive reviews.

Having said that I believe Citizen Kane not to be just a movie...it's a definitive success in the history of cinema, a magnum opus in filmmaking which transcends from generation to generation aspiring more filmmakers. Orson Wells...the man behind and in front of the camera crafts and portrays a narrative so elegant and also a rich and a profound piece of art that hasn't been seen before.

From the first shot to the last shot Welles's direction is nothing short of a mesmerizing and innovative with each shot having it's own meaning and purpose to the story. His use of the camera movements, the lighting and the dialogue is meticulously crafted and composed with each scene creating a visual feast to your eyes.

I've often seen arguments saying the movie is just technically impressive and there is no story and it's boring, which I totally disagree with, Citizen Kane is not just the technical brilliance, the storytelling Welles brings along weaves a tapestry of intrigue and mystery with such a simple yet so beautiful twist. I absolutely love and adore the opening scene of the movie and the first two acts which follows along with it, the third act do feel a bit more dragged and dramatic they landed the ending. Throughout the movie we are introduced to a series of flashbacks and interviews where we journey through Kane's rise and fall. His relationships, his rise to power and the eventual downfall all the while tackling the truth of human existence.

I can't stress enough how well Welle's portrayal of Citizen Kane is, it's both charismatic in the first part and tragic in the final part, the psyche of a man consumed by ambition draws the narrative further. The supporting cast was nothing short of brilliant. Everybody delivers a performance for the ages.

It's almost a century since it's release and in conclusion I can verify that Citizen Kane is a cinematic masterpiece- a timeless work of art that resonated and will resonate with generations to come. It's not a film to be seen, it's a film that should be experienced, analyzed, studied and appreciated not just for it's technical abilities but also it's profound exploration of the human mind.

Thank you for reading.

I would consider it ONE of the best movies of all time. No "hot takes" or "overrated". It's really excellent.

My scorching hot take is that this movie is very good. Feels modern, accessible, and essential--a 1941 version of "Succession." But the accessibility belies the film techniques being invented before our eyes--this is the sort of movie where I discover something new every time I watch it. An all-timer desert island movie.

greatest movie of all time

Artistically, it is perfect and the story behind it is really interesting. However, the actual entertainment value of it is lacking and the acting really isn't very good. It's still a classic that everyone who wants to learn about cinema should watch

[9.0/10] There’s a scene toward the end of *Citizen Kane* where the title character walks down one of his hollow palace’s many gaping hallways. As he does, scores of reflections of the man cascade into infinity on either side of him, the product of two mirrors dividing the various shades of the man beyond measure.

Maybe it’s just a cool shot. Orson Welles packs plenty of those into the film. Plenty of ink, digital and old fashioned, has been spilled on the revolutionary techniques and advancements the famed director brought to cinematic storytelling with *Citizen Kane*. But what’s impressive is how well those visuals hold up eight decades later.

Fades from one image to the next that could seem kitschy in other hands carry gravitas and the weight of years. His camera is almost always moving, with slow pans across massive spaces to communicate the cavernous confines. He’ll zoom in on the right expression, centering the intensity of a given moment or allow his actors (chiefly himself) to sell the emotion of a scene, or pull back to reveal a perfectly choreographed hum of activity, the whirr of his well-oiled, well-funded machines when they were still in sync.

Even in more basic sequences, he blocks and frames his performers and sumptuous sets so well that you could practically freeze the picture at any given moment and still comprehend the feeling of a scene. Much of that’s owed to the expert use of lighting here, where some characters are bathed in brightness, others are hidden in the shadows, and still more slowly make their way from one to the other, signifying the moral and personal descent at play in this character story.

In short, for a film made so long ago, it looks and feels remarkably modern. Scads of older movies, some long post-dating *Citizen Kane* scan like celluloid stage plays, static and simple in their visual composition. But Welles’s 1941 opus moves so nimbly, makes meaning from its visuals so adeptly, paints each frame so well, that its lasting influence becomes apparent on aesthetics alone. With texture this good, Welles could be forgiven for setting up Kane’s hall of mirrors as simply another striking image in a movie not short on them.

But I’d like to think there’s more to it. I’d like to think that this image, of Charles Foster Kane in one of his lowest moments, is a symbol of all the people he was and might have been, in contrast to the sad old man he became. So much of *Citizen Kane* is about its title character’s rise and fall amid the country that provided for it. But it’s also about chance, the small unplannable moments -- an unexpected gold mine, a random meeting with a woman who laughs at you, a quotation mark in a headline -- that end up directing the lives of even the grand figures of the ages.

It’s old hat now to note that Welles’s classic charts the ascent and decline of its protagonist, from an idealistic, disrupting dervish of new money surrounded by friends and hangers-on, to an hollowed out husk of a person, flanked only by his meaningless mountains of possessions and all that empty space. But what’s striking, even now, is the levers that Welles and company pull to illustrate that decline, the ideals Kane abandons on his steady slide into lonely obsolescence.
The linchpin is, as the film slowly reveals, his lost childhood, but that manifests in a bevy of interesting ways. Most notably, it comes through in how Kane positions himself as a man working on behalf of those who share his working class background. But as the film wears on, his purposes become more and more self-centered, until his own best friend challenges his people’s crusades as one big vanity masquerade, an act of condescension and theater from a man who’s more apt to revel in his luxury and play for admiration than genuinely put his money to work for the good of the common folks.

It comes through in his faltering commitment to the truth and his ideals, making grand declarations of purpose and aiming to challenge power, only to direct his media empire in support of his pet projects to try to bend reality to his whims and needs. In the process of his descent, he alienates everyone sorry enough to grow close to him.

His wife and son are betrayed (and implicitly felled) by his infidelity and his inability to give up his ambitions to protect their well-being. His oldest friend turns his back on him having truly seen who his erstwhile running buddy has become in self-serving opulence. The second wife he marries and forces into the mold of opera star purely so as not to have to admit defeat finally departs as well, alienated by his growing detachment from anything beyond his own immediate orbit. *Citizen Kane* traces the streams and estuaries that emerged and converged to bring its subject to this sorry culmination and realization of what’s wanting in all of it.

Early in the film, Kane tells his adoptive caretaker that had he not been raised amid such luxury, he might genuinely become a good man. It’s hard to know whether or not he’s right on that count. Maybe the money slowly but surely corrupted him. Maybe the absence of a mother who loved so much that she did what she thought was best for him, at great personal hardship, staunched his ability to give and receive that sort of love himself. Maybe living under the implied abuse of his biological father would have messed him up in ways less glamorous but no less inevitable.

Maybe he would have lived an ordinary, at times difficult, but ultimately happier life had he stayed in Colorado or never met his mistress or finally found enough to satisfy that gaping hole within him that constantly demanded more. Maybe that mix of nature and nurture and pure chance simply creates an unpredictable cocktail of a person depending on how it all shakes out.

That’s the lasting takeaway from *Citizen Kane* that rings true eighty years later. We still contain multitudes, as Charles Foster Kane did, suffused with possibilities lost, realized, and imagined. Whether in 1941 or the present day, human beings are still rife with boundless potential and just as many contradictions.

A man who claims to be only for the people can steadily lose touch with them. A man who only wants love can have no idea how to truly give it to others and receive it in return. A man who carries one of the best-recognized names and personas in the land can leave this world without ever truly being known. And the man who has everything can look back at his life, at the many versions of himself he might have been, and realizes he’s missing the one thing he truly wants.

Cinema Paco 2. Image 4.5/5. Sound 4/5. Just considered one of the best films of the cinema. That frames, that planes, that camera angles, that lighting that .....