Metacritic reviews

Charles Chaplin’s 1952 film is overlong, visually flat, episodically constructed, and a masterpiece—it isn’t “cinema” on any terms but Chaplin’s own, but those are high terms indeed.

Neither comedy nor tragedy altogether, it is a brilliant weaving of comic and tragic strands, eloquent, tearful and beguiling with supreme virtuosity.

Few cinema artists have delved into their own lives and emotions with such ruthlessness and with such moving results.

Although it was not quite his last film, there can be little doubt that Limelight was Charlie Chaplin’s farewell. It is also probably his most personal, revealing film.

Departing from most forms of Hollywood stereotype, the film has a flavor all its own in the sincere quality of the story anent the onetime great vaudemime and his rescue of a femme ballet student from a suicide attempt and subsequently from great mental depression.

Elements of self parody from the master of slapstick leave you yearning for the early work that made his name. But it's worth a watch to see Chaplin and Keaton in one of few on-screen appearances together.

It's a verbose, technically creaky work, both sentimental and self-indulgent, and never very funny except for a brilliant scene with Chaplin and Buster Keaton as a disaster-prone musical duo. However, there are sublime, deeply affecting moments and for those who think Chaplin one of the key figures of 20th-century popular culture, it is a crucial movie.

In short, everything that sounds potentially magnificent about Limelight disappoints, while the aspect that sounds potentially dreary—Chaplin playing earnest life coach to a sickly ballerina—works like a charm. The man was full of surprises.

Overburdened by Chaplin’s creaky script and fussy acting. Nevertheless, his musical duet with Buster Keaton is an absolute gas, proof that even when Chaplin was bad, he could still be good.

Chaplin's sentimental and high-minded view of theatre and himself.