There's really no classifying The Kid. The best one can do is say that it has all the old melodramatic material, but so jazzed up with fun and with its drama so simply and humanly played, that it almost fools you into believing it is like life.

| Jun 25, 2021

Jackie, legging it madly 'cross corners, is almost as good for box office purposes as our own Charles, playing the Artful Dodger to a Bowery bum.

| May 17, 2021

Formerly it was the custom to say that Mr. Chaplin played down to the level of his audiences. Now it is to be hoped that he will lift his audiences up to this new level of his own.

| Aug 5, 2020

The story is only of the average order... [but] the quality of the film lies in the joyous fooling of Chaplin and the Kid.

| Aug 5, 2020

Chaplin is, of course, hilarious, but it's Coogan's cherubic charm that makes this so special.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 5, 2020

To my mind The Kid is by long odds the best motion picture comedy ever made. It has more than humor; it has tenderness and literary charm. Incidentally it is the first child picture I ever saw that did not give me an acute pain to the bowels.

| Mar 24, 2019

It was Chaplin's first full-length film, and the action is perhaps too episodic; he hadn't yet mastered the structural demands of the long form. But several of the episodes... are sublime.

| May 15, 2018

While it will move people to uproarious laughter and keep them in a state of uneasing delight, it also will touch their hearts and win sympathy, not only for the star, but for his leading woman, and little Jackie Coogan.

| Jul 22, 2008

As always, Chaplin's opulent Victorian sentimentality is made palatable both by the amazing grace of his pantomimic skills and the balancing presence of harsh reality.

| Jun 24, 2006

There is less pure horse-play in The Kid than in the other Chaplins. The comedian depends chiefly upon his inimitable pantomime, and it scores every time.

| Mar 25, 2006