Man With A Movie List

Director: Orson Welles Year: 1942 Run-time: 1 hr 28 min - I'm not as taken by this one as many other critics, it seems. There's no doubt that it contains flashes of the brilliance of Citizen Kane , and the acting in many scenes is sublime. But the pacing is all over the place - almost certainly a consequence of the great swatch of material that was removed by the studio and will probably never be recovered - with rapid dialogue often overriding our ability to identify the characters' motivations and intent. There was potential for this to be a powerful tragedy, but it doesn't build to the level it needs to - again, because the studio replaced the ending. I'd love to know what Welles intended the film to look like, but we likely never will, and what's left just isn't quite compelling in my opinion. 

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.