Someone awhile ago on FR said something about how Citizen Kane was ground breaking with the use of lighting or something. Whatever.
Sometimes movies are so groundbreaking that all later movies tend to copy them. For science fiction, for example, Star Wars was so influential that for a long time nobody made any science fiction films that did not directly reference Star Wars in some way. Its like there is a clean break, before Star Wars, and after Star Wars.
Citizen Kane is the same thing, only bigger, but more subtle. Citizen Kane was the first film to use many of the now conventional editing and story telling techniques we have all gotten used to in films. For a filmgoer today, we kind of shrug at the innovations. We look at Citizen Kane like we have seen it before, and that's true. It has been copied so much in little ways that nearly every film uses something from the film, and so we have already seen Citizen Cane thousands of times before we actually see Citizen Kane.
Citzen Kane?
Innovative, OK.
But the greatest movie ever made?
Uh, no.