The only movie Nicolas Cage called the greatest of all time: “Nothing ever comes close”
The debate over which movie can be definitively called the greatest of all time is as open-ended as it is unending, but Nicolas Cage was willing to throw his hat into the ring and settle on one picture as the best that cinema has ever seen.
Cage was raised on the moving image, having grown up on a steady diet of celluloid before getting into the family business. Once he’d distanced himself from the Coppola clan and struck out on his own, he evolved into one of his generation’s most daring, committed, and dedicated performers.
That’s remained true throughout his career, even if there have been some bumps in the road. Sure, Cage won an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ and then seamlessly cracked the A-list by instantly following Leaving Las Vegas with The Rock, Con Air, and Face/Off to transform himself into a bankable action star, but it would be an understatement to say there have been some ups and downs along the way.
Years of reckless spending left him in a financial hole that only years of terrible genre flicks could drag him out of, and it’s definitely not a coincidence that the new, improved, and debt-free Cage has been doing some of his best work now that he’s being motivated by things other than the paycheque.
He’s been in classic movies, great films, mediocre blockbusters, and dozens of eminently forgettable straight-to-video turds, but he’ll always remain a student in cinema. With that in mind, Cage couldn’t look beyond one of the usual suspects when it came to naming the finest feature in cinema history.
“I was watching Citizen Kane when I was like eight years old, and I just watched it again,” he told Rotten Tomatoes. “I watched it at night and I watched it the next day, and that is the best movie ever made. Nothing really ever comes close to it, and even now, the editing today doesn’t match.”
Continuing his celebration of Welles’ breakthrough masterpiece, Cage was adamant that “in terms of performance, in terms of film editing, in terms of the cinematography, in terms of the music, all of it just came together perfectly.” Not only that but more than 80 years after its release, he maintained that Citizen Kane “has never really been challenged in any way” as the best of the best.
For one of the industry’s most unique, distinctive, and offbeat performers who derived their inspiration from all walks of life dating from centuries past to the modern age, Citizen Kane feels like a surprisingly safe choice for someone of Cage’s reputation to call the all-time greatest. Then again, he’s not exactly in the minority, and there are innumerable valid reasons as to why it’s been held up as the movie that nobody will ever be able to beat.
