Mank review, Culture Whisper
For a certain type of cinephile, it's probably akin to sin to admit you don’t like Citizen Kane. The 1941 classic from Orson Welles is widely and wrongly considered the greatest film ever made. It’s stuffy and exhausting, focused on a wealthy, corruptive magnate who hides his want of love in a melodramatic castle. Charles Foster Kane isn’t only unlikeable (often a quality in movies), he’s uninteresting.
Yet Welles and the film’s screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz insist that ‘Rosebud’, the final yet unwitnessed utterance from a dying Kane, holds the key to unlock who he really was. Thankfully, David Fincher’s latest film – his first since 2014’s Gone Girl – examines Kane’s development stages without ever igniting a bored headache.
