50
Attenborough's very traditional biopic is a disappointment. Downey has captured the idealism and the melancholy, but not the sentimentality of the comic.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
60
Sir Richard Attenborough's long-in-the-making account of the life of Sir Charles Chaplin is a film you desperately want to like, but it emerges as a big, shiny, old-fashioned biopic that ultimately fails either to illuminate the genius of its subject or to excite as a story.
50
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
All-in-all, however, even though Chaplin is fitfully entertaining, it fails to touch enough emotional chords to make it of more than passing interest.
50
Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum
This packaged tour through the great man's career is unenlightening and obfuscating, despite an adept lead performance by Robert Downey Jr.
33
Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman
A massive Hollywood biopic about a man who never quite seems there.
50
Washington Post by Rita Kempley
It's a monumental biopic that cheapens the hero's successes by glossing over the failures that surely also shaped the man.
50
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
This is a disappointing, misguided movie that has all of the parts in place to be a much better one.
50
The New York Times by Vincent Canby
Chaplin is to serious biography, even to Mr. Attenborough's Gandhi, what unfortified cornflakes are to real food. It's slick packaging around what is mostly warm air.