Citizen Kane

Sight and Sound's 'Top 100 Greatest Films of all time' is the critics poll the magazine takes each decade with more than 1,600 critics, to test the temperature of what is considered a classic!

This year, we are screening one of the choices from the poll each month, as part of our new Sunday Classics series. At the screenings, we invite you to join the conversation and vote for YOUR own classic, which we'll screen at the end of 2024 as part of our very own Audience Poll! 

For many years, Citizen Kane was considered the ultimate greatest film of all time and topped the poll each decade from 1962 to 2002. With innovative cinematography from Greg Toland, Orson Welles masterpiece of cinematic storytelling was knocked off the top spot in 2012 and came in at Number 3 in the Sight and Sound poll of 2022.

The newspaper baron Charles Foster Kane, one of the richest and most powerful men in America if not the world, dies. A newspaperman digs into his past seeking the meaning of his enigmatic last word: "Rosebud." He finds evidence of a child torn away from his family to serve Mammon.

Grown into manhood, Charles Foster Kane becomes a newspaperman to indulge his idealism. He marries the niece of the man who will become President of the United States, and gradually assumes more and more power while losing more and more of his soul. Kane's money and power does not bring him happiness, as he has lost his youthful idealism, as has the America he is a symbol for.

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