2. Citizen Kane - Orson Welles
It's almost become a cliché that Citizen Kane should top any list that it features on, and certainly most people reading this article will assume that it would do so again. Undeniably one of the greatest films ever made (even if you outright don't like the film, you can't argue its capital G Greatness as a work of art) - and certainly one of the most influential, at least - Citizen Kane, no matter what anybody writes about it, is untouchable. Some things just are, and this just is. It comes second here only as a matter of personal enjoyment (nothing I write about it could ever alter its standing as a behemoth of cinema). Orson Welles' finest achievement in a film which he both directs and bills lead (otherwise his best performance is as Harry Lime in The Third Man), Citizen Kane is, as if you didn't already know, the story of Charles Foster Kane, the publishing tycoon holed up in Xanadu, his vast, lonely fortress; a man who can have anything in the world but ultimately only wants Rosebud, his childhood sled and cinema's most iconic MacGuffin. To continue with the clichés, there really isn't much you can write about Citizen Kane that hasn't been said before. It's the most studied, analysed film of all time. It is perhaps instructive, then, to tell you no more, to just let the film loom over this list like it looms over cinema; let it hang large like the oversized poster of Kane himself, which is too gargantuan for one man to ever bring down.