Citizen kane

As a film critic and historian who's written for Sight and Sound since 2011, I like to think that the greatest films of all time are always on my mind, but, in truth, they were particularly on my mind last summer. Last July, I received the official word that I was among the select group of critics picked to partake the Sight and Sound critics' poll to decide the greatest films ever made; a survey the British magazine first convened in 1952 and has repeated on a once-per-decade basis ever since. In the weeks before my deadline to vote, I meditated on what constituted a great film with unusual intensity and self-reflection.

When talkies appeared in 1927, Hollywood went searching for talkers to write them. It turned to men like Herman J. Mankiewicz: to journalists. The greatest screenwriters of the golden age were journalists first; unlike novelists, they thrived in Hollywood — at least professionally. Good films and good journalism need brevity; novels don’t. Reading about F. Scott Fitzgerald struggling at MGM, 12 years after The Great Gatsby, is brutal, like trying to watch a man learn to walk. The film Mank, by David Fincher, tells the story of how Mankiewicz and Orson Welles created Citizen Kane — for which they shared an Oscar for the screenplay in 1942 — and how they bickered over the credit.