The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

85. 1941 - Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane
RKO

Honourable Mentions: How Green Was My Valley, The Lady Eve, The Maltese Falcon

If you were to attempt to sum up Orson Welles' Citizen Kane with just a word, monumental would probably be the most fitting. While obviously it doesn't infer the great many multitudes that comprise Welles' film on a narrative and thematic front, it does speak to its stature both in a filmic sense and as a piece of cinema history - another of those 1940s classics that, though pilloried in its time, became a lodestar for cinephiles as the years went on.

Welles' direction and performance were revolutionary and daring, and while Hollywood didn't immediately alert to this multifaceted and ultimately hugely influential talent, subsequent productions - such as The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil, and The Third Man - soon changed that.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.