Film Forum

(1941, Orson Welles) “Rosebud.” The public rise and private fall of newspaper magnate and president wannabe - played throughout by 25-year-old Welles. The most electrifying debut in screen history – acting and directing – routinely voted by international critics as the greatest ever. DCP. Approx. 119 mins.

Reviews

“Even better than you’ve heard (or remember). It’s nothing less than the birth of modern cinema.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out

“So highly regarded in the firmament that it’s possible to lose track of the thrilling, pure cinema that defines it.”
– Robert Levin, AM New York

“The Orson Welles film is generally considered the greatest American film of the sound period, and it may be more fun than any great movie I can think of.”
– Pauline Kael

“It is one of the miracles of cinema that in 1941 a first-time director; a cynical, hard-drinking writer (Herman J. Mankiewicz); an innovative cinematographer (Gregg Toland), and a group of New York stage and radio actors (Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, et al.) were given the keys to a studio and total control, and made a masterpiece. Citizen Kane is more than a great movie; it is a gathering of all the lessons of the emerging era of sound.”
– Roger Ebert

“Welles was trying to make the Last Word in movies, looting Hollywood for its finest techniques and technicians to build himself an immortal monument. It is the scope of his youthful presumption that keeps Kane perpetually fresh and exciting.”
– Joseph McBride

“[A] lightning bolt of cinematic modernism.”
– Richard Brody

“Still the best place I know of to start thinking about Welles—or for that matter about movies in general.”
– Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

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