Citizen Kane
1941
*****
Director: Orson Welles
Cast: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Everett Sloane, Ray Collins, George Coulouris, Agnes Moorehead, Paul Stewart
Newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane dies a lonely old man. His life story unfolds in flashbacks, as Kane's family, friends, lovers and co-workers try to decipher what this enigmatic man meant with his last word, "Rosebud". The Oscar-winning screenplay by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz is brilliant, but this is one of the most audaciously directed films ever made. In his debut Orson Welles used every cinematic trick in the book and invented a few new ones to boot. Kane's story was controversially based on the life of William Randolph Hearst who almost had the negatives destroyed. Now it's widely hailed as the finest film ever made, and rightly so.
