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Citizen Kane

Director: Orson Welles

Year: 1941

Run-time: 1 hr 59 min

- What came to mind upon seeing Citizen Kane for the third time is that its director wants us to stay a little detached. He wanted us to question everything about the film, from its time-jumping structure to its cinematography decisions. It's a film that tells us its plot ahead of time so that we can get the upper hand on it. The film's real subject is the idea of biography itself.  It's heady stuff, but ultimately, it's so well put together that none of this stops us from investing ourselves wholly, even on the third viewing.

- The idea of Citizen Kane as the very model of a medium achieving "maturity" is something that has been derided many times (usually by annoyed video game critics). Is this the moment where cinema broke through some important barrier. Of course not. But it is a damn good film, and it certainly holds up.



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