CITIZEN KANE / Essential Cinema

Sunday, January 29th at 11:00 a.m.
and Tuesday, January 31st at 7:00 p.m.
FREE ADMISSION / HD Digital Presentation
**Suggested donation: $5.00**
Film introduction starts on the hour, film starts approximately 15 minutes after the hour.

BRAND NEW 70th ANNIVERSARY DIGITAL RESTORATION!

ESSENTIAL CINEMA is The Loft's FREE monthly series of classic art films on the big screen. See old favorites, hidden gems and exciting re-discoveries the way they were meant to be seen!

“More fun than any great movie I can think of.” – Pauline Kael, THE NEW YORKER

"Citizen Kane is the biggest cinematic landmark since pictures first started moving." - TOTAL FILM

"Citizen Kane is more than a great movie; its surface is as much fun as any movie ever made. Its depths surpass understanding." - Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN TIMES

"Some called him a hero. Others called him a heel..."

Perhaps no other film has shaken and stirred the motion picture industry quite as strongly as CITIZEN KANE, a film that has retained its popularity through the decades and still remains one of the most beloved of all movie classics.
Arguably the greatest of American films, Orson Welles's 1941 masterpiece, made when he was only 26, still unfurls like a dream and carries the viewer along the mysterious currents of time and memory to reach a mature (if ambiguous) conclusion: people are the sum of their contradictions, and can't be easily known.
Welles plays newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane (based loosely upon the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, though Welles made sure to make no mention of this … it eventually went public at the time of its first preview), taken from his mother as a boy and made the ward of a rich industrialist. The result is that every well-meaning or tyrannical or self-destructive move he makes for the rest of his life appears in some way to be a reaction to that deeply wounding event.
Written by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz (shockingly, the film’s only Academy Award win was for Best Original Screenplay), and photographed by Gregg Toland, the film is the sum of Welles's awesome ambitions as an artist in Hollywood. He pushes the limits of then-available technology to create a true magic show, a visual and aural feast that almost seems to be rising up from the viewer's subconsciousness.
CITIZEN KANE is truly a one-of-a-kind work, alternately thrilling, comedic and tragic, and in many ways it’s still the most modern of modern films from the 20th century.