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A nice bit of foreshadowing can make any movie even more fascinating to watch. These subtle clues about events yet to come will often go over the heads of the audience the first time around, but can be exciting to notice upon a rewatch. After all, these brief moments can prove that the filmmakers knew exactly what they were doing all along, having thought about exactly how the film would end from the moment it started.

Some iconic movies, however, take this idea even further. Every once in a while, a film is made that subtly reveals key details of the ending within the very first sequence. A carefully constructed opening scene has the ability to hint at where the film may be heading, even if viewers don't realize that it is all being laid out right in front of them. While they may be overlooked on their first viewing,...

Most critics and scholars agree that the Golden Age of Hollywood reigned between 1915 and the mid-1960s. However, the true height of this period, when the "Big Five" major film studios maintained their greatest display of power, lasted from the end of the silent era in the late 1920s to the birth of the New Hollywood movement in the mid to late 1960s. The Golden Age of Hollywood operated under the studio system, a filmmaking process in which the "Big Five" studios controlled production, distribution, and exhibition. The "Big Five" studios included Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Rko Pictures.

The Golden Age of Hollywood cultivated technological advancement, narrative invention, editing philosophies, and cinematographic styles that would influence film industries all around the world. Cinema's origins began as a novelty, a cultural phenomenon many believed would be nothing more than a fad. The Golden Age of Hollywood...

Citizen Kane follows the rise and fall of ambitious publishing tycoon Charles Foster Kane, and its ending brings the story back to the start in a well-structured mystery narrative. The lead character, played by Orson Welles, who also directed the 1941 feature, dies at the beginning of the plot, breathing his last breath as he says the ominous word "rosebud." His last word leads to an investigation deep into his scandalous life, but only the film's audience is treated to a definitive, albeit still puzzling answer.

Called the greatest movie ever made, Citizen Kane plays out as a pseudo-biopic as viewers are led through Kane's entire life story, from his childhood in Colorado to his rise as a yellow journalism tycoon and a politician in New York, eventually building up to his demise at his colossal mansion, Xanadu. The way “rosebud” links the beginning to the end was quite a unique plot point in its time,...

A thousand releases down the line, Criterion gives us a special edition of the most creatively brilliant & innovative movie in history, as the label debuts selected 4K releases. It’s a four-disc set, with three Blu-rays that hold a huge quantity of well-chosen and well-produced extras. What can be said about Kane that hasn’t been debated decades ago? Our Declaration of Principles is to just try and tell the truth: we try a ‘civilian’ approach, sketching the film’s wonderments without assuming the reader is already a true believer in the Cinema God Orson Welles. Which Welles definitely is.

Citizen Kane 4K

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 1104

1941 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 119 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date November 23, 2021 / 47.96

Starring: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead, Ruth Warrick, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Everett Sloane, William Alland, Paul Stewart, George Coulouris, Fortunio Bonanova.

Cinematography: Gregg Toland...

Citizen Kane is no longer the perfect movie, at least according to Rotten Tomatoes. As the Orson Welles classic is universally acclaimed and widely considered to be among the greatest movies of all time, it's long held a perfect 100% Certified Fresh score on the review aggregator website. After Rotten Tomatoes recently added a negative 80-year-old review to the 115 positive reviews, the score has since dropped to 99%.

The negative Citizen Kane review was written for the Chicago by Mae Tinée, likely a pseudonym as a play on the word "matinee." The headline for the review reads, "Citizen Kane Fails to Impress Critic as Greatest Ever Filmed." Tinée (if that is her real name) goes on to critique the classic movie in ways most other reviewers hadn't.

"It's interesting. It's different," Tinée writes. "In fact, it's bizarre enough to become a museum piece. But its sacrifice of simplicity to eccentricity robs it...

“Mank” is headed for the double digits. The combined predictions of Gold Derby’s Experts, Editors and Users favor the black-and-white biopic for at least 10 nominations, more than any other film in contention. Another Netflix contender “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” trails with seven. “Mank” is expected to bag three trophies: Best Supporting Actress for Amanda Seyfried, Best Cinematography and Best Production Design. Its other anticipated nominations are Best Picture, Best Director for David Fincher, Best Actor for Gary Oldman, Best Original Screenplay, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing and Best Sound.

SEEhow “Mank” shapes up in the Best Cinematography race.

The Gold Derby predictions center has 14 of the Oscars’ 23 categories available to predict at this time with the contenders in the remaining nine categories dependent on shortlists that are yet to be determined by the academy. Once they are added, “Mank” is likely to be predicted additionally in Best Makeup and Hairstyling and Best Score,...

Amanda Seyfried is a fan of old school movies and classic Hollywood. Considering the Mank star has been acting since she was a teenager, this isn’t a surprise. In her mind it’s a prerequisite, something that comes with the territory: each young actor is obligated to “study film on the job” when starting out. So she’s seen Citizen Kane, of course, and knew the stories of Orson Welles’ masterpiece taking on newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. And yet, even she was barely aware of Marion Davies, the once popular movie star from a century ago whose image Kane left like roadkill in its wake.

Perhaps that’s the dark magic of the movies though. Seyfried can recount early memories of Davies’ contemporaries like Charlie Chaplin, who loomed large in her childhood. But the shadows cast by these legends have a way of obscuring everything else.

“I grew...

“Citizen Kane” has been hailed for generations as the greatest movie ever made, but the newspaper mogul who inspired Orson Welles’ iconic portrait of a reclusive, affluent entrepreneur who dies alone did everything he could to act as if it never happened. Throughout his life, William Randolph Hearst kept the movie out of Hearst newspapers and never discussed it publicly, a tendency that was picked up by his heirs in the years following his death.

That all changed on Thursday night at the 60th Sf International Film Festival, when Hearst’s grandson, William Randolph Hearst III, spoke for a half hour before a screening of the film. The biggest surprise? He’s a huge fan of the movie — and has a lot of ideas about it.

Discovering a Masterpiece

“Inevitably, someone wants to ask me what I think and I usually disappoint them by saying how much I love the movie,...

Part I.

In 1963, Film Quarterly published an essay entitled “Circles and Squares.” It addressed the French auteur theory, introduced to America by The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris. Auteurism holds that a film’s primary creator is its director; Sarris’s “Notes on the Auteur Theory” further distinguished auteurs as filmmakers with distinct, recurring styles. Challenging him was a California-based writer named Pauline Kael.

Kael attacked Sarris’s obsession with trivial links between filmmaker’s movies, whether repeated shots or thematic preoccupations. This led critics to overpraise directors’ lesser films, as when Jacques Rivette declared Howard Hawks’ Monkey Business a masterpiece. “It is an insult to an artist to praise his bad work along with his good; it indicates that you are incapable of judging either,” Kael wrote.

She criticized auteurist preoccupation with Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, claiming critics “work embarrassingly hard trying to give some semblance of intellectual respectability to mindless,...

Citizen Kane (1941) Director: Orson Welles Stars: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Dorothy Comingore   A rich white guy dies and everyone is super nosy about his last words. (If TMZ was around, this movie would've been over in five minutes.) In 1998, the American Film Institute declared Citizen Kane the greatest movie ever made. As a young cinephile, I searched out this elusive classic and prepared myself to be dazzled by cinema. Nope. This movie blows....

Jean Arthur films on TCM include three Frank Capra classics Five Jean Arthur films will be shown this evening, Monday, January 5, 2015, on Turner Classic Movies, including three directed by Frank Capra, the man who helped to turn Arthur into a major Hollywood star. They are the following: Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It with You, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; George Stevens' The More the Merrier; and Frank Borzage's History Is Made at Night. One the most effective performers of the studio era, Jean Arthur -- whose film career began inauspiciously in 1923 -- was Columbia Pictures' biggest female star from the mid-'30s to the mid-'40s, when Rita Hayworth came to prominence and, coincidentally, Arthur's Columbia contract expired. Today, she's best known for her trio of films directed by Frank Capra, Columbia's top director of the 1930s. Jean Arthur-Frank Capra...

Tomorrow when the Supporting Actress Smackdown 1941 hits, we'll just be discussing the five nominees (24 more hours to get your ballots in for the reader's section of the vote!). As it should be. But for the first time in a Smackdown I polled my fellow panelists as to who they would have nominated if, uh, they'd have been alive in 1941 and if, uh, they'd been AMPAS members.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde lust after Lana Turner & Ingrid Bergman. And so does our panel.

Angelica and I didn't vote (I haven't seen enough 1941 pictures, I confess) but our other three panelists have recommendations for you outside the Oscar shortlist. In fact, all three of them only co-signed 2 of Oscar's 5 choices... different ones mostly so the Smackdown should be interesting (I'm not telling you which as the critiques come tomorrow!). So here are some For Your Considerations for your rental queues or your...

Screenwriter for Don Siegel and writer/producer of classic TV series, he named many of his colleagues as communists

In 1951, when the screenwriter Richard Collins, who has died aged 98, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (Huac), he named more than 20 colleagues and friends in the film industry as belonging to or sympathising with the Communist party. Although by so doing he saved his Hollywood career, it was an action that cast a shadow over the rest of his life, regardless of his success in film and television as a writer and producer.

According to many, it was a cowardly act, which Collins later tried to justify, as did directors Elia Kazan and Edward Dmytryk, by saying that it was his patriotic duty, and that Huac knew the names anyway. However, in an interview in Victor Navasky's book Naming Names (1980), Collins called himself "a son of a bitch, a miserable little bastard.

Chicago – I have written about thousands of movies and yet I still feel daunted by addressing “Citizen Kane,” recently released in a stunning Ultimate Collector’s Edition Blu-ray for the 70th anniversary of what many still consider to be the best film of all time. What could I possibly add to the conversation? Pulitzer Prize winners have dissected the film down to every decision made by Orson Welles during its production. All I can tell you is that the movie has lost none of its power. It is still one of the most striking cinematic achievements of all time and the impressive Blu-ray box set does the film the justice it has long-deserved.

DVD Rating: 5.0/5.0

As I said, “Citizen Kane” is still mesmerizing. I watch it every few years and I go into it every time with the same trepidation — Will it hold up? Is it still powerful? Much to my amazement,...

Approaching Citizen Kane is like approaching the Mona Lisa or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Such are great works of art - they’re often encased in amber. And with whatever the innovations they’ve created or expanded upon, coming at them at a later time is often like solving a mystery – you know there’s a reason why they’re so important, but you have to understand the context. And then there’s the legacy of its writer/director/star Orson Welles. The man who directed the greatest film in cinema history only to be denied the chance to repeat himself. That’s a lot of baggage to sort through, so let’s unpack, shall we? Our review of Citizen Kane on Blu-ray follows after the jump. Welles stars as Charles Foster Kane. The film begins with the character’s death, uttering “Rosebud.” What that means the film hopes to understand.

Orson Welles, Ruth Warrick, Citizen Kane Orson Welles on TCM: The Third Man, The Lady From Shanghai Schedule (Et) and synopses from the TCM website: 6:00 Am The Tartars (1961) A barbarian army attacks Viking settlements along the Russian steppes. Dir: Richard Thorpe. Cast: Victor Mature, Orson Welles, Folco Lulli. C-83 mins, Letterbox Format 7:30 Am Tomorrow Is Forever (1946) A scarred veteran presumed dead returns home to find his wife remarried. Dir: Irving Pichel. Cast: Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles, George Brent. Bw-104 mins. 9:30 Am Moby Dick (1956) Epic adaptation of Herman Melville's classic about a vengeful sea captain out to catch the whale that maimed him. Dir: John Huston. Cast: Gregory Peck, Richard Basehart, Leo Genn. C-115 mins, Letterbox Format 11:30 Am The V.I.P.S (1963) Wealthy passengers fogged in at London's Heathrow Airport fight to survive a variety of personal trials. Dir: Anthony Asquith. Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Louis Jourdan.

Production Designer Arthur Max discusses the realism of the 12th Century in Robin Hood

Arthur Max has been a production designer for the last 15 years, yet he's only worked with two directors. Though, one could argue that they are two of the finest directors currently making films today: David Fincher and Ridley Scott.

Arthur Max has contributed to Ridley Scott's last four films, most recently working on Robin Hood. Which will be released on DVD and Blu-ray September 21. I recently had the chance to speak with Arthur Max about his extensive work designing the elaborate look of this new movie, and here's what he had to say:

You've worked with Ridley Scott on other films in the past. I was wondering if you were on board during this movie's first incarnation, when it was the revisionist piece that Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris had written?

Arthur Max: No,...

Orson Welles‘ 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane, winner of the best original screenplay Academy Award, will hit UK theaters on Nov. 30. In addition to London’s bfi Southbank, Citizen Kane will also be screened in Newcastle, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. Written by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz, Citizen Kane stars Welles as a newspaper magnate based on William Randolph Hearst. Also in the cast: Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore (a distorted version of Marion Davies), Ruth Warrick, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, and Everett Sloane. Cinematography by the masterful Gregg Toland, music by Bernard Herrmann. Citizen Kane was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including best picture, director, and actor (Welles). More information here.