Critics reviews

The pictorial variety of the film is, I think, unprecedented. The "News on the March" sequence becomes a virtuoso exercise in all the techniques that the rest of the film won't be using. For perhaps the first time in history, Welles artificially distresses his staged scenes to make them match archival footage. He adds scratches and light flares.

It is a stylistically shape-shifting masterpiece of cinematic high modernism, and a scandalously gossipy melodrama. It is a Proustian consideration of time and consciousness and a grab-bag of often hilariously quotable lines. It is a story that is about storytelling, especially those we tell about ourselves – from the capitalist Thatcher's self-important pomposity to Jed Leland's bitterness to Bernstein's sagacious ruefulness and regret. It is a tragedy, a comedy, at times a hallucination.

The camera eye that seeks also deforms, sprawling tracking shots and depth of focus side by side with shock cuts and warped vantages and the most astonishingly dissonant of soundscapes, the myth assiduously erected is inevitably dismantled. "I know I've played at the game, like a moth in a blue flame, lost in the end just the same..." An endless fountain of inspiration for Resnais, Ruiz, Coppola, Roeg and innumerable others; for Welles, just a beginning.

It remains a marvel, combining the technical and artistic innovations of German Expressionism with High Hollywood gloss, the sweep of grand studio entertainment with continental self-awareness. Kane is an impeccable construct — an intricately structured screenplay that nevertheless ends on an unanswerable existential question.

Citizen Kane" is, of course, the quintessential debut, a film which so deftly combines the vigor of youth with the command of expertise that it managed at once to seem both wholly classical and daringly new... To this day its legend endures: the grand summation of the sound era and the beginning of modern filmmaking anew, "Citizen Kane" remains essentially perfect.

Welles's film can be boiled down to the story of a Musilian "man without qualities" seeking, because he has no self-definition, to define himself through others, through power, through popularity, through ownership. His inevitable failure is a cascade that began before he was born, with a strange man in a married woman's bed, whispering promises he will not keep.

No one but Charlie Chaplin and Erich von Stroheim had ever made the cinema such a one-man show; Welles brought to the display his own willfully hyperexpressive and janglingly playful delight in technical wizardry, as well as impulsive exuberance, tragic self-consciousness, and reflexive immediacy. He grabbed the keys to the kingdom as one might take the keys to Dad's car, and suddenly other directors felt free to grab for them, too. He made them all feel young and brash or instantly old.

87. Big comedown, anticipated100 here. But while I'd long cited Kane as an exception to the rule that movies shouldn't attempt to depict decades of a person's life, it, too, suffers from the sorry sight of young, supremely gifted actors slathered in old-age makeup... And I had to admit to myself this time that I'm more hugely impressed by it than deeply moved.

Kane's story is as much about locating the psychological bruises that shape public figures as it is about the essential enigmas of said figures. The pioneering of gossip journalism and the social ills proliferated by that advent are here just as interesting and important as the building of Xanadu and the collecting of all those exotic treasures.

Citizen Kane highlights the struggle that often exists between the private, internal and metaphysical reality that makes up the essence of each individual, and its distillation in objective reality... [It's] a suspense yarn that surprises us with its metaphysical/existential complexity. In some respects, the film is truly a supreme portrayal of childhood...

It's long been near-impossible to watch the film with anything approaching fresh eyes, so heavily does its oppressive reputation weigh on every frame. This is most unfortunate, because Kane – for all its solemn moments and grim undercurrents – is essentially a jaunty enterprise: very much a very young man's film, the result of a 25-year-old director being let loose on the film-making medium and, like Kane on his newspaper, gleefully trying everything he can think of – just to see what happens.

It remains a master class in aesthetic design in which all the production elements (bustling staging, overlapping dialogue, choose-your-own-adventure plotting, lighting so chiaroscuro that most of the shadows fall on the ceiling, editing so fluid it is better described as rhythm) work together so seamlessly as to seem impossible without one another.