This documentary is full of grim detail, but offers little fresh insight. What it does is showcase his enduring brilliance as a performer.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 17, 2025

No doubt each new generation will reexamine and reassess the offscreen Chaplin even as the monumental achievement expressed through his body of work will continue to seduce freshly-stunned viewers.

| Jul 28, 2023

You finish the film happy that it fell to Chaplin to be Chaplin, not you.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 28, 2022

The documentary never stays too long on any one persona. It is too busy with ideas and with probing and fascinating argument to bother with something as trivial as “the real”.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 28, 2022

Even after this film exposes some of Chaplin's darkest flaws, his personal life remains a mystery. But his genius is undisputed.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 25, 2022

The Real Charlie Chaplin deserves credit for not trying to explain away his myriad contradictions or retrospectively cancel him for all his reprehensible behaviour.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 23, 2022

Disappointing.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 22, 2022

In its search for the personality behind the creator of one of cinema’s most famous comic characters, The Real Charlie Chaplin too often lapses into dreary convention, despite flashes of brilliance in its use of archive footage.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 22, 2022

The Real Charlie Chaplin delivers on its promise. It doesnt reveal anything new, but through craft and sensitivity reminds us that even eternal heroes have many sides to them.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 21, 2022

A gripping, clear-eyed overview of his life and works.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 20, 2022

The film might not give us a “definitive” portrait of its subject, but it does give us an expansive one.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 19, 2022

Though much of Chaplin’s biography is well known -- the five marriages, the impoverished London childhood, his expulsion from the US on trumped-up political charges during the witchhunts -- The Real Charlie Chaplin expands the narrative considerably.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 18, 2022

The Real Charlie Chaplin is an excellent film biography and its focus on human drama is for everyone, not just for fans or film buffs.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 18, 2022

The film-makers dig deep into Chaplin’s back catalogue and their enthusiasm is infectious (a clip from The Gold Rush creates an almost painfully itchy desire to watch the whole thing).

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 18, 2022

Even now, there is something truly life-enhancing about the universal language of silent comedy, and Chaplin spoke it better than anyone.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 18, 2022

In its search for the personality behind the creator of one of cinema’s most famous comic characters, The Real Charlie Chaplin too often lapses into dreary convention, despite flashes of brilliance in its use of archive footage.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 17, 2022

It’s a brisk and smartly edited narrative, illustrated with some evocative home movies and period footage (carefully spruced up for the occasion by the look of it), though Pearl Mackie’s melodramatic narration can begin to grate.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 17, 2022

Just as we feel that we have grasped the truth behind the image, it vanishes into thin air: The Real Charlie Chaplin is a Sisyphean task of the directors’ own making.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 17, 2022

It states the facts for what they are. I suppose that it’s up to you whether you can separate the artist from the work, or whether you’ll be able to watch The Kid, which is actually about childhood vulnerability, in the same way ever again.

| Feb 17, 2022

Naturally, the pace is brisk. But there are bold, risky flourishes too; the movie keeps finding new angles and tangents.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 17, 2022