Citizen Kane`s unchallenged reputation as one of the greatest films in all cinema - in many people`s view the greatest - is matched only by the accumulation of critical commentary which has surrounded it. As Laura Mulvey shows in a fresh and original reading, the richness of the film, both thematically and stylistically, is inexhaustible. In a lucid and perceptive critique she investigates the psychoanalytic structure which underlies the films presentation of Kane`s biography, for once taking seriously what Orson Welles himself disparagingly referred to as `dollar-book Freud.`