Critics reviews

The silent Tramp satirized American society but nonetheless made audiences feel good about themselves. By contrast, The Great Dictator used sound to more explicitly call out the failings of his adopted country, something he would only develop further with the pitch-black postwar satire Monsieur Verdoux and the exiled, anti-1950s broadside of A King in New York.

Roberto Rossellini called Chaplin's much-maligned 1957 A King In New York "the film of a free man," this, too, is the film of a free man, albeit a freeman flailing. Certain of its infelicities are kind of fascination: Chaplin's Mack Sennett-derived conception of storm troopers has some interesting side effects, one of them being that Billy Gilbert makes more sense here than he does in His Girl Friday.

Chaplin's film is filled with brilliant slapstick, and his wonderfully exaggerated portrayal of the preening, insane Hynkel, often speaking a kind of nonsensical mock-German, is immortal... It's hard not to be enormously moved by this film — by its humor and its exceedingly personal, almost intimate quality.

Chaplin is the transcendent figure in the history of cinema—he put the cinema into history with his comedy, and here—in his devastating comic mockery of Adolf Hitler and denunciation of the tyrant's hateful and world-dominating madness—he turns his comedy into an act of vast historical moment.

One of the most courageous films ever made, Chaplin's satire attacked Adolph Hitler while the US government was still officially neutral towards Nazi Germany, but it's even more remarkable for its understanding of the complex relationship between Fascism and popular culture.

A genuinely great film, perhaps Chaplin's greatest, though not necessarily his most nearly perfect or even his most personal... What, then, is great about The Great Dictator? Simply the remarkable duality of Chaplin as the Dictator and the Barber. Not simply as one or the other, but as both in one.