'Citizen Kane' Still Best Film Ever. Here's Why

It storms after us down the corridors of history like its own hero. Bloated, grotesque, tremendous; destroying as it goes; influencing and renewing too. Every fresh decade calls it the best film ever made. Every new generation poses and tries to answer the question, "Why?"
 
Citizen Kane is 70. Three score years and 10 after its New York premiere in May 1941, it is still everywhere. Not just in its own flesh, as reissue, telecast or DVD, but in the monstrous spell it casts on filmmakers. Long after the critics-turned-directors of the French New Wave first made Orson Welles a demigod – remember the young hero of François Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coupsdreaming of stealing stills from a cinema showing Citizen Kane? – the figure of the haunted megalomaniac, presiding over the shards of his own life, is inescapable. From Michael Corleone in the Godfather films to Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood, via Robert De Niro's Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (the pugilist's Citizen Kane), the examined life is worth living, irresistibly, for an audience nourished on themes of ambition, self-destruction and the war between private and public actions.