Opiniões dos críticos

As Peter von Bagh notes, the film's autobiographical component represents only one strand of its cumulative power. It is not just Chaplin's testament to his own art, but to art in general and to the striving for love that brings meaning to any life.

Calvero's contact with the audience is remote, distracted and transitory. Chaplin's, as he looks into the camera, is electrifyingly intimate, immediate and enduring, living on to this very day.

Limelight's opening, on-screen summation as a "story of a ballerina and a clown" may be the most modest commencement statement for what is certainly one of cinema's great romantic tragedies.

Chaplin handles dialogue superbly, as if he'd devoted his lengthy career to Shakespeare and Ibsen rather than pantomime. Some of the speeches he's written himself are a bit too floridly theatrical, but he sells them with a relaxed, casual delivery, demonstrating that he might well have been one of cinema's towering figures even had he been born half a century later.

It's cut from the Star Is Borncloth, but rather than indulge in melodrama Limelight is etched with that unmistakable Chaplin delicacy: there's a loving grace to every image, cut, and musical cue (Chaplin's score would win the Oscar, in 1972). There's also pain.

Chaplin revisits his music hall roots in Limelight (1952), which does contain some remarkable moments, including an outstanding sequence with him and Buster Keaton performing together on stage. Unfortunately, much of the film is overlong and repetitive.

When we think of Chaplin's art of combining the abstract and concrete, real and surreal, hard fact and dream, the present with the past and the imagined, and again the effortless mixing of the pantomime, ballet, burlesque, dialogue and monologue into an indivisible whole, simple as a moment in nature, we can well sense how far Limelight is from the ordinary Hollywood fare; it should sooner be placed among films like Citizen Kane, Ivan Groznyi and Alf Sjöberg's Miss Julie.

Chaplin dies in Limelight. It is indeed the only time in his film career that he acts out death. The penultimate shot in this film is one of the most extraordinary in Chaplin's total body of work as director... a personal film in an era when first person perspective was not fashionable in the cinema, with the passing of time, Limelight has continued to establish itself as a great classic.

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... The final shot is among the most eloquent and moving images I know, a picture of the soul in flight.

Now, twelve years and thousands of films later, and right after a grueling tournament consecrated to cinematic modernity, Limelight dwarfs most of its competition. It is as if I had never really seen it before.

Throughout, Chaplin's comedy-drama doesn't produce one belly laugh, but hardly a gesture in it lacks grace, point, or perfection. A master at getting the effect he wants into the camera's eye, he can conquer you with anything from a throttled, straining sound in his throat to a silly smile.