To comment as if I have anything worth uttering about the greatest film ever made is arrogant and superfluous. It's like writing a review for Beethoven's Ninth, War and Peace, or the Sistine Chapel. Yet all I can do is record my impressions to remember what I felt about it, and prove that I experienced it. This is the equivalent of great literature in film. I saw Citizen Kane for the first time in 2014 while packing to move from Starkville Mississippi to Athens Georgia. I thought it was captivating, but not the knockout picture I expected. I couldn't find much entertainment or gripping drama about a newspaper man with little to make you care about him. I watched many classic films back then out of an obsessive impulse to fill in gaps of my filmgoing knowledge. Which is what I appear to be doing again in 2025 except magnetized threefold. I not only bought Citizen Kane on blu-ray, I watched it a second time a night later with Roger Ebert's commentary, and then again with Peter Bogdanovich's commentary.

Seeing it cold on my big 65-inch 4K TV and on blu-ray does wonders. It really is crucial to watch film on a big screen and with no distractions. This time ten years later I followed the story with rapt attention and every scene struck me as an artistic composition and symphony of light and shadow. As the story of this William Randolph Hearst simulacrum unfolded, I savored all the visuals as if gazing upon paintings in a gallery. Some of the deep-focus photography is so powerful that it conveys meaning and emotion in a single frame. As I've gotten older too, I've noticed some parallels between myself and Charles Foster Kane, even if they're superficial. He collects things, most emblematically classical statues. For a time I was doing the same, albeit much smaller and cheaper replicas of classical statuary. They've piled up in my own house. More broadly, I collect all sorts of video games, magazines, books, collectible cards, CDs, physical media and ephemera. What does collecting at a deeper level symbolize? That I have an unquenchable hunger, just like Kane.

Then there's the mystery of Rosebud and what this means to Kane. Even knowing it's the sled as if that was a spoiler doesn't diminish the impact the final sequence has. Seeing the Rosebud sled thrown into a furnace, it signifies what Kane really lost: his childhood. It was robbed from him; his happiest moments were playing outside in snow before his life was signed over to a benefactor. In my life, I had the happiest of childhoods, but it's still lost and I've been in mourning for its loss like a deceased family member since the early 2000s. As I turn 40 Citizen Kane touches my intellect and heart anew. Hearing Roger Ebert's erudite analysis shot-by-shot of the film is the best commentary I've ever heard. It adds a layer of poignancy as I watch this film from an age of ancient man, made 85 years ago with everyone in it long dead, and the ghost of one of my favorite people--Roger Ebert--speaks in my headphoned ear, delivering film class-level analysis. In that moment it's just me and Roger and he's alive again watching his favorite movie. Put together it's a numinous experience that I'll forever relish.