It remains as witty, tragic, unlikely, unique and fascinating as ever.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 12, 2024

Genuinely innovative film-making.

| Jan 18, 2024

We aren't going to quibble about the genius business. Time will take care of that and if Welles goes down in history as one well be happy to have been among those who enjoyed the results of his great talent.

| Mar 2, 2021

The sheer brilliance and audacity of Citizen Kane... make the film the most astounding cinematic achievement of the season. It ranks with Disney's Fantasia as a milestone in motion picture technique.

| Mar 2, 2021

Ordinary standards will not serve for Citizen Kane; extravagance of idea for serious ends is not common enough in the cinema to provide a yardstick.

| Mar 2, 2021

[It] is my opinion that Mr. Welles has been sympathetic and kind. He reveals great respect for people, and a knowledge of their powers and talents.

| Mar 2, 2021

This first screen effort of Orson Welles is of such vast difference to other pictures, in subject material, in treatment, in technique, in cast and in performance that the best advice perhaps is, "See what you think."

| Mar 2, 2021

In [Citizen Kane] Welles is revealed as having absorbed a tremendous amount of the tricks and tradition of the theater, and still more, that he possesses the skill and craftsmanship to adapt such knowledge to motion pictures in a masterful way.

| Mar 2, 2021

It's interesting. It's different. In fact, it's bizarre enough to become a museum piece. But its sacrifice of simplicity to eccentricity robs it of distinction and general entertainment.

| Mar 2, 2021

The satire here is as savage as Swift's, and in its unrelenting light the victim becomes positively nauseous; yet the treatment is brilliant and continuously pleases the aesthetic sense.

| Jul 7, 2020

Citizen Kane, written, produced, and directed by a young man of 25 whom America considers a genius, is an outstanding film, amazing in its presentation and vast in its conception.

| May 6, 2020

Orson Welles was ahead of his time.

| Original Score: A+ | Dec 1, 2018

It is a triumph of the film, and proof of its solid value and of the sense of its director and all concerned, that a human touch is not lost. Sympathy for the preposterous Mr. Kane survives. Indeed, there is something about him which seems admirable.

| Sep 6, 2018

Welles' performance is nothing less than astonishing. He begins as a youth of 21, goes through middle age to his death, and makes every moment believable in voice, walk, and gesture. Even in his love scenes is Welles effective.

| May 1, 2017

This stuff is fine theatre, technically or any other way, and along with them the film is exciting for the recklessness of its independence, even if it seems to have little to be free for.

| Apr 29, 2016

What's striking now is how utterly modern it is in structure.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 29, 2016

Some day, and the time won't be long in arriving, Welles will be the greatest director in Hollywood.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 30, 2015

It can be classified as, in a number of aspects, one of the most arresting pictures ever produced.

| Jan 18, 2013

An ecstasy of light and shadow, of clashing textures and graphic forms, such as hadn't been seen since the silent era.

| Sep 3, 2012

Welles's deeply haunting depiction of the life of William Randolph Hearst has long been synonymous with the director's spectacularly odd and genuinely tragic career.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 30, 2012