Charlie Chaplin City Lights

"City Lights" is excruciatingly funny and terribly, terribly sad. It makes you chuckle hysterically. You have the greatest time imaginable, and yet, occasionally you find little hurty lumps in your throat.

That final scene. Last week, CNN asked -- in "The Screening Room's Top 10 Romantic Moments" -- whether this was the most touching film moment of all time. Could be. Either way, if it doesn't move you, you're beyond human reach.

With its themes of selflessness and grace, as well as its graceful intertwining of comedy and pathos, this is a fine time for a revisit.

Is this film still funny after 76 years? I think and hope it is.

The British comic is still the consummate pantomimist, unquestionably one of the greatest the stage or screen has ever known.

A beautiful example of Chaplin's ability to turn narrative fragments into emotional wholes. The two halves of the film are sentiment and slapstick. They are not blended but woven into a pattern as eccentric as it is sublime.

City Lights is a paean to our best impulses, a plea for humanitarianism and justice.

No filmmaker has ever been as successful as Chaplin in tugging at our heartstrings while simultaneously leaving us helpless in laughter, and this gem finds him operating at the peak of his abilities, even throwing his usual social critique into the mix.

There's dignity and folly to The Tramp in City Lights, and everything in between.

Chaplin's growing seriousness, his desire to be more than a mere comedian have deceived him into holding sentiment more precious than fun.

City Lights gets to the heart of the Tramp. It is a beautiful romance about loving someone for who they are and not their social or economic status - and it features one of the most tear inducing and iconic endings in Hollywood history.

A screen gem. Youngsters and up.