Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane has been named as the greatest American film ever made by a critics poll conducted by the BBC. The BBC culture website got 62 film critics from all parts of the globe to list 10 films they considered the greatest in American cinema. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo came in at third behind Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 classic gangster epic The Godfather, but to no great surprise, it was Citizen Kane that came out on top.
Welles’ film has continually been regarded by critics as the greatest film ever made, winning five consecutive ‘Sight and Sound’ polls as well as topping AFI’s 100 years, 100 Movies list in 2007. The film is held in such high esteem due to its pioneering use of music, cinematography and narrative structure, which reinvented how films were made at the time of its release.
Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg and Billy Wilder are the most represented directors on the list, each having five entries in the top 100. The most recent film on the list is Steve McQueen’s 2014 Oscar Award winning 12 Years A Slave, whilst the oldest film on the list is the notorious 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation, the D.W Griffith film is highly controversial due to its praising of the Ku Klux Klan.
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