Rules of the Game: One of the best movies, if not the best movie, ever made

It's been many years since I've seen Jean Renoir's 1939 "The Rules of the Game," and it still holds up as no doubt one of the best movies if not the best movie of all time. This is surprising in a lot of ways, most notably in that you have to hate most of the main characters: French aristocrats who live in idleness and luxury, playing games with one another, cheating on their spouses, behaving recklessly with the feelings and emotions of others, living off the labor of others while contributing little or nothing to the betterment of their world, oblivious of the war that is about to erupt all around them - and yet, and yet - each character is so fully developed in such a short time and space: De Chesney, the pompous count - collector of musical toys (the image of him next to his grandest acquisition is one of the great portrait moments in cinema) who is also a Jew, we learn, and therefore just not quite as secure socially as he seems to be; Octave (a bit overplayed by Renoir) a ruined man at the end, a participant in a crime, friendless, an artistic failure, cut off from those he has tried to love; the countess, desperate for love and alone in a country she does not understand; Lisbeth, the maid with social aspirations; and many others. No film has ever explored class relations with more acuity and wit (The Leopard comes close - but it's really Lampaduso's novel that deserves the credit there) - and none has a higher level of both cinematic and literary excellence: some of the scenes are so extraordinary that they can match Citizen Kane any day: the animals killed in the hunt, twitching to death, showing the cruelty of those who would kill - animals or one another - for sport; the conversation between the count and his mistress, as she leans against a Buddha statue; the gamekeeper, Schumacher, crying his eyes out in the night - just three examples among many, and the dialogue, among all characters - not just the aristocrats but the servants as well - is so smart and insightful and revealing: "iets (regimes) I can accept, but not lunacy (the chef)"; "Me? I don't have an old mother!". It takes a little while to get into this film - as is true of so many great works of art - but by the end you have experienced an entire world.