 He also considered it to be his most personal film , along with The Magnificent Ambersons . Many critics , including Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Rosenbaum , also consider Chimes at Midnight to be Welles 's finest work . Several years after its initial release , film critic Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that Chimes at Midnight " may be the greatest Shakespearean film ever made , bar none . " Joseph McBride has called it " Welles 's masterpiece , the fullest , most completely realized expression of everything he had been working towards since Citizen Kane . " Welles was disappointed with the film 's reception , complaining that " almost nobody has seen it in America , and that drives me nuts . " 
