The Film Canon: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

It is impossible to discuss Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) without examining the film’s two central figures: William Randolph Hearst, the American newspaper magnate that the film’s central megalomaniac was based on, and Welles himself, that sensational  wunderkind whose talents…

Out of the Past: “The Third Man” (1949)

The Vienna depicted in Carol Reed’s The Third Man no longer exists. It is a maze of sewers, back alleys, political gamesmanship, and lies. Nothing remains except for abandoned bourgeois flats, decrepit buildings and an amusement park devoid of any…