Citizen Kane (1941)

Most people think so. 81% of audiences gave it a thumbs up based on 5,966 votes. Critics gave it 100%.

Newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane is taken from his mother as a boy and made the ward of a rich industrialist. As a result, every well-meaning, tyrannical or self-destructive move he makes for the rest of his life appears in some way to be a reaction to that deeply wounding event. Wikipedia ↗

Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film directed by, produced by, and starring Orson Welles, who was 25 years old during production. The film examines the life and legacy of Charles Foster Kane, a wealthy newspaper magnate loosely based on William Randolph Hearst, through a series of flashback interviews conducted by a reporter attempting to discover the meaning of Kane's mysterious dying word: "Rosebud." The investigation reveals the arc of an extraordinary life — from Kane's impoverished childhood, through his idealistic early years as a crusading publisher, to his gradual corruption by wealth and power, and finally his lonely death in the vast, empty palace of Xanadu. Citizen Kane revolutionized virtually every aspect of filmmaking — Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography, which kept foreground and background simultaneously sharp, was unprecedented; Welles's use of low-angle shots, ceilings visible in frame for the first time, and elaborate camera movements influenced every subsequent generation of filmmakers; and the non-linear narrative structure, which assembled a life from contradictory testimonies rather than chronological events, anticipated modern storytelling by decades.

Citizen Kane was a commercial disappointment upon release, partly due to Hearst's campaign to suppress it, but it has been voted the greatest film ever made in virtually every major critics' poll for over 50 years.