Citizen Kane at 85: A Revolutionary Masterpiece Still Hiding in Plain Sight

Orson Welles’s film may no longer shock us the way it shocked audiences in 1941—but only because so much of modern cinema learned to speak its language.

Charlton Allen | July 11, 2026

I do not often write about movies. In fact, I have not written an essay about one in more than thirty years.

The last time I did so followed a two-night movie binge in the winter of 1996, the first night of which began with my date and me in what we call in the Carolinas a snowbank—and what those north of the Mason-Dixon Line would more accurately describe as a roadside ditch with some frozen precipitation on it.

And no, Mom and Dad, if you happen to be reading this—and that is more likely you, Dad—it was not “my” car.

And, Dad, you may recall that it was your idea to buy my grandmother’s rear-wheel-drive 1987 Ford LTD Crown Victoria two-door sedan—yes, apparently “two-door sedan” was a thing—and this one came complete with a plaque dedicating the car to my grandmother.

My grandfather, I can only assume, was in the doghouse when he bought it. All the same, the Blue Bomber was absurdly ill-suited to a winding winter road.

Back to the story: After a brief spell of industrious problem-solving involving floor mats and a questionable grasp of mechanical engineering, we were back on our way to what passed for movie theaters in the Year of Our Lord 1996. 

Had that relationship lasted, we would have had one heck of a first-date story to tell the kids. As it happened, I was left with something less romantic but still useful: one heck of a tangent for this column.

Being, at the time, a starving, sardonic young writer trapped in a 3L’s body, I decided after that episode to leave movie criticism to the self-appointed expert class.

Which makes it fitting, I suppose, that I should wander back into those waters with a film approaching a century old.

That film, of course, is Citizen Kane, returning this week for a commemorative limited engagement in theaters across the fruited plain.

Does Citizen Kane live up to the hype? Of course not—not eighty-five years later, at least. But that is precisely the point.

The picture was so different, so audacious, so avant-garde in 1941 that calling it “groundbreaking” understates the case. And because so much of filmmaking since has descended from it—or from films that........

© American Thinker