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.
This critically acclaimed mystery drama’s heart and soul undeniably comes from its eponymous protagonist: Charles Foster Kane. As we watch this renowned individual, through superbly innovative filmmaking, be literally plucked and tossed from his euphoric childhood into the depraved world of newspaper journalism, we come to understand and empathize with his persistent attempts to protect the forgotten man as well as his eventual transformation into a symbol of the very corporate power, greed, and arrogance that he initially fought to vanquish. But although Kane’s immoral actions slowly began to grow and rob the best of him, what remained through every secret affair and yellow headline of his was his “Rosebud”, so to speak. What others saw as an autocratic magnate who objectified the populace and libeled his way to royalty was truly no more than someone robbed of a free, youthful innocence and warped into an inexperienced money-making Rupert Murdoch; this was the reality Kane became aware of and wholly embraced upon his the muttering of his final words, “Rosebud”, the name of the favored sleigh from his childhood. Screenwriters Welles & Mankiewicz toss conventional narrative aside in favor of an endlessly complex introspection of a morally pure soul struggling to sustain against the descending darkness of shady corporate interests. Their purpose is not to entertain the masses, but rather have them contemplate their own flawed existences, remember their invaluable capacity for good, and encourage them to spread that goodness in any conceivable way, so as to promote a philanthropic society instead of one ruled by power-hungry mercenaries.
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.
[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 .....
So we have a harsh and low rating here...
I've loved film and the worlds it creates for most of my life. This film is often said to be one of the finest created....
What we have is 80 years old though. The acting is of the time - hammy and over-wrought. The cinematography is very impressive for what age it came from. The plot though is very slow-paced until the Susan story comes into play.
I struggled with the reputation and the quality of this film. It's not aged at all well. If anything, it gives us a perspective of how film has evolved and what a basic level of quality we have come to expect.
One thing I do congratulate is the aging special effects. The make up is on point in creating aging on Orson Welles. If only The Irishman had done as well 80 years on...
For all this, I cannot recommend a viewing. I've watched Fred Astaire films from this time and enjoyed them immensely... This one, I did not enjoy to any significant level.
4.5/10
Everything about this films production, cinematography, camerawork and especially the special effects is simply incredible. I can only guess what techniques were used and I am not entirely certain which of these were even possible in 1941. Welles having been only 25 at the time is also simply mindblowing.
I even tip my hat to the innovative kind of storytelling by starting at the end and filling the blanks little by little.
But the story or rather life of Charles Foster Kane just isn't that interesting. I really think this is a film for those interested in film and its history but not for most other people.
There are a lot of classic movies that I liked. This isn't one of them. The acting alone is horrendous and the story doesn't grab me at all. Just doesn't hold up, I guess... I'm sure it was influential, but I didn't like it.
Vince Vaughn has aged :asterisk_symbol:really:asterisk_symbol: well!
makes absolutely no sense. anyone who says they understand it is lying.
Citizen Kane may or may not be a monumental film, it's a question of taste. But what is undeniable, is that Citizen Kane is a monument to filmmaking.
I would consider it ONE of the best movies of all time. No "hot takes" or "overrated". It's really excellent.
The use of camera angles was interesting but the story wasn't.
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
I do not know how this movie is considered good let alone great.
The tagline for this movie is “It’s terrific” and it really is. I can see why it is a classic even if it is a little slow. A very interesting story following Charles Foster Kane and his difficult life. Kane is a truly complicated character. There are some real iconic shots and very impressive camera work for 1941. A definite must watch for any film buff or anyone who just enjoys movies and wants to see how far we have come.
Could not finish this one. Very interesting film and rightfully praised, however boring to watch and does not hold up sadly.
Great movie. The best in history? Not a chance. But you can find great performances, the plot is interesting and above all, it has great cinematography that many modern films should learn from. It was undoubtedly influential and is a classic.
I watched this movie as part of my cinema classes. It's an incredible piece of history. The things Orson Welles did in this movie, in view of the time it was made, are incredible. As a movie, though, it was hard to watch. The pacing does not fit modern audiences, and I don't think I would've finished it if I had simply come across the movie on TV or something and watched it on my own.
I liked it much more, ten years after my first viewing. When I was about 17, I tried to watch as many classics as I could. In hindsight I didn't fully appreciate a lot of those movies as much as I should have and I sometimes wish I didn't get around to those movies much later. On the other hand it is fun to rewatch this movie as a 27 year old and see how much more I appreciate it over when I was 17. Rewatching this movie also gave me flashbacks of watching old dvd's on a crt tv.
I still don't love this movie, I didn't get any big emotional feelings and if I was watching this movie alone, I might have gotten distracted easily. On the other hand I did find it interesting to discover more about Kane's life through multiple people's stories. There are some beautiful shots and since I was able to focus better on the story, it did keep me interested.
Not a movie I would rewatch a lot but I can appreciate it and "Rosebud" must be one of the most iconic words in film history.
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.
The cinematography is superb. Half of the premise was great. The film should have focused on the theme of Kane's isolation and developed that idea more than it did. The whole rosebud thing should have been cut out. The structure was interesting (journalists going to interview former colleagues about Kane), but likewise not enough was done to exploit this novel concept. Overall it wasn't bad, but it's an awfully mediocre movie to be considered the greatest ever.
Summit work in the history of cinema, partly overestimated.
It's impossible watching this movie without notice how revolutionary it was for the history of the cinema, the way the camera is used deserve the highlight, because it has a lot of movement happening in scene captured by a different perspective than what normally was used in that time, and this technique was done with a lot of mastery here.
This is not the only notorious point in the movie, because the story is also very interesting (besides it is a little bit slow in some parts) and makes the watcher very curious to find out what is (or who is) Rosebud. It's possible to say that the result is rewarding and has a very strong meaning. I agree when they say this is a required movie to the one who likes movies.
normally i hate classical movies, but i love citizen kane. the cinematography and production design (lightning) is top-notch. the story is fascinating enough to make it a must-watch movie.
"Citizen Kane" is still topping the best movies of all time list of all respectable film connoisseurs. Orson Welles' first feature film undeniably set a new bar for Hollywood and strongly influenced film noir. Greg Toland's cinematography was ages ahead, particularly in his use of shadow, pan focus, and compositing to create depth, and the non-linear storytelling with multiple narrators was a significant innovation for the time. Part of the myth was also fueled by the controversy of its satire of William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper tycoon who heavily influenced public opinion on the Spanish–American War.
Still, it's undeniable that cinema has been evolving and improving ever since, and that historical value aside "Citizen Kane" is far from being the best film ever. The writing is solid indeed, but the story is static and lacks tension, development, and any emotional impact, offering little more than some sociopolitical reflections on the rise and fall of a fascinatingly ambiguous character. It bothered me that we never get to see actual inner conflicts or even crucial moments of his life, like the death of his son and parents (only briefly mentioned in "The News on the March"). It's almost as if Welles purposedly wanted to keep us distant from the character and redirect our empathy toward the other characters' roles as unreliable narrators.
No one can deny that it still looks terrific for a film almost 80 years old, though. Just think of the uncanny opening sequence that leads to Kane's death, the journalist's visit to Thatcher's archive, or Kane's self-confinement in the Xanadu gilded cage. As the rooms get bigger and bigger, Kane is surrounded by fewer and fewer people until he is completely alone, dreaming of his parents' boarding house.
Outstanding film, no question.
'Citizen Kane', at least to me, feels like such a unique film in terms of how it is brought to life - I don't recall seeing anything that exactly matches it in that regard. It's thoroughly entertaining, I do love how it is crafted together. The score is terrific and the performances from the cast are excellent.
Orson Welles, the director too of course, is perfect for the titular role. He is sensational, it must be said. He makes Charles Foster Kane absolutely fascinating, despite the questionable nature of the character. I basically enjoyed everyone else who came onscreen, the more memorable ones being Joseph Cotten (Jedediah) and Dorothy Comingore (Susan) - George Coulouris (Thatcher) has a few amusing moments, also.
The editing and pacing are two other things that impressed me, as did the fantastic News on the March opening. This is one of those films that I've heard about for as long as I can remember, so I'm glad to finally get it watched - added to the fact it didn't disappoint.
In all honesty, if this was made today, in almost the exact same way, it would still be a smash hit. It's timeless in its visuals and in its mystery with one of the greatest open endings in cinema history. Really enjoyed it, clearly ahead of its time in 41.
Mank brought me here, what a masterpiece.
I can see how young people who checked it out of curiosity in between superhero movies, find it boring. I think Kane's life story as told in the movie was very interesting.
I think it's kinda lame
I can understand why people said that this is or was one of the best movies of all time. a classic of cinema.
What can I say about this film that hasn't already been said? It's one of the best films I've ever seen.
Citizen Kane is one of those movies that makes me question my ability to watch movies critically. It's called one of, if not THE greatest movie of all time, but I simply don't like it that much. I find myself wondering if I don't like it because I don't understand its deeper meaning, or if I just flat-out don't like it.
The greatest movie of all time huh....it was super helpful to know the back story but still no 10 for me
greatest movie of all time
Shout by Nicholas PriorVIP 7BlockedParent2018-06-25T02:03:45Z
Citizen Kane
I can appreciate the impact this film had on cinema.
The cinematography is fantastic for its time.
The story of Kane is intriguing.
However, I found the film an absolute bore.
I would suggest to avoid this, unless you want to study film.
6/10
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