Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane: 1941 drama, Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, among others.

Marc Horton Plot Synopsis: Here's a real silver-screen heavyweight — and I'm not just talking about Orson Welles. He plays media heavyweight Charles Foster Kane, who treats everyone in his family and his newspaper as a servant and exiles anyone who doesn't play the toady. In that way, it's very much a 21st-century tale. Anyway, he croaks in the beginning, gasps Rosebud, and the hapless reporters are sent about the country to find the missing piece of the puzzle.
Early in the film, he's a happy-go-lucky billionaire happy to blow his fortune on a crappy rag. He turns it into an empire, natch, marries a socialite, dances, sings and runs for governor. But politics isn't any good without some action on the side, just ask these guys, strikes up an affair with some half-assed singer and loses the election. Kane ditches the old lady, marries the singer, and moves into Xanadu — where the film loses its vitality and becomes a bore — kinda like Kane himself. The singer's bored, the servants are bored, his old toadies at the paper are long gone, probably bored to tears, so is his ex-wife and eventually the second wife decides to pack it in and get the hell out. At the end, Kane croaks and the reporters, sans Wikipedia, are still no closer to the Rosebud mystery than they were at the beginning. Only in the final sequence does the viewer find out the missing Rosebud link, kicking off decades of joyful symbolizing merriment and hours of inside-of-eyelids-gazing pleasure at Film Studies courses around the land.
Politically Incorrect Movie Review: It has its moments, the first half of the movie is fast-paced, but then it drags. The greatest film of all time? You can toss those opinions in the same furnace as Rosebud.