1. An interesting plot
2. "Something" that says "Watch me again!" I've watched "The Godfather" - my choice for the best movie of all time - at least 20 times. Same with "Silence of the Lambs" and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" All for different reasons, but the same "Watch me again!" call.
CK ia a totally forgetable waste of time. The socialist/progressive agenda made it repulsive.
Mere innovation in technique is worthless if it does not make a movie enjoyable. Doing something for the first time does not make it great, important or noteworthy.
What socialist/progressive agenda? It’s about a left wing power hungry media mogul. He gets his start by pimping for unions and his lack of any feelings of warmth for other human beings other than how he can use them eats away at his soul. It’s no more socialist/progressive than Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’.
The plot is how a man’s life can be taken apart like an onion and how different people view the same events differently. It’s the cinematic equivalent of the Modernist fiction of Conrad and Faulkner.
It actually shares themes with The Godfathe. How a dynamic and talented man can lose his soul and end up a walking self parody in his self created “paradise”. It predicted the careers of Elvis Presley, Marlon Branado, Michael Jackson and a just a bit...Welles himself (though Welles never lost his soul).