French Pick Kane

Les Cahiers du Cinema, the influential, highfalutin magazine for Parisian intellectuals that made American moviemakers the toast of all France in the 1950s, has pronounced: The best movie ever made is Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. No surprise there, perhaps, because the cod biopic of a press magnate monster based on the life of William Randolph Hearst regularly tops the lists. But at number two is the quiet and underrated masterpiece, and the sole movie made by the British character actor Charles Laughton, The Night of the Hunter. It tied for second with Jean Renoir’s World War I satire The Rules of the Game. The Americans flooded the list with every great director from John Ford to Ernst Lubitsch. Full list below.