Citizen Kane

I guess it was ground breaking at the time and that's what you have to consider, apparently the cinematography and narrative really broke out of the mold and shaped cinema as we know it today.

I guess the compliment you paid it - that's it's pretty good, 65 years after it was made, is an indication of how 'modern' it was.

I'm never sure what 'greatest' means so I don't really have an opinion.

I didn't particularly enjoy it. I don't think there is such a thing as "the greatest film ever" it's just a matter of personal preference, I know somebody that thought "Rocky" was a great film

No one has really asserted that "Citizen Kane" was the most enjoyable movie ever made. The assertion usually refers to the fact that the movie is an encyclopedia of cinematic technique, although by this late date, most of the techniques are standards of the industry.

I'll side with Brandon on this one: "Citizen Kane" is, above all else, a director's movie. I went to see "Kane" in a movie theater with an actress who had never seen the movie before. She remarked afterwards: "I don't know why everyone thinks this is such a great movie. The acting was good, but it wasn't great." That's debatable (I think most of the acting is superb), but it misses the point.

Reviewers (starting, perhaps, with the influential Pauline Kael) praised the work more for the direction of Orson Welles and the cinematography of the incomparable Gregg Toland than for the acting. That was, in itself, a radical reorientation of film criticism, which had previously focused on the people on the screen rather than the people behind the camera. It's what they call in film school the "cult of the director," and that's very much the direction that film criticism takes today.

It's easy to see that, in 1941, people viewed movies very differently. "Kane" was nominated for nine Academy Awards but won only one: for best original screenplay. A review of the other nominees that year shows a more traditional slate of "actor-driven" movies (only one other "director-auteur's" work was nominated that year: Alfred Hitchcock's "Suspicion" for best picture). When critics started paying more attention to the director than to the actors, however, the critical estimation of "Citizen Kane" rose considerably.

Hitchcock himself adopted many of the cinematic techniques (unacknowledged) from "Citizen Kane" and "The Magnificent Ambersons." Welles revolutionized the way movies were shot and his influence centered around "Kane" gave birth to genres like film noir (also, of course, influenced by German expressionism, but, then, so was Welles). It is also the dramatic flow of "Citizen Kane" that prompt film historians and critics to place it consistantly on the top. That doesn't even mean it is their own personal favorite film -- Richard Roeper's is "The Godfather," and that happens to be on the head of the list for worldwide film director's best movie ever made.