The Kid
Man, this one really socks you in the jaw. One minute you’re giggling like an idiot at the fight scene between The Kid and The Bully, and also the whole “window con” hustle, and the next you’re sitting there, blinking hard, trying not to ugly-cry as The Kid gets hauled off to the orphanage.
Jackie Coogan—arguably the first actual child star—turns in an all-timer of a child performance here. On the Criterion Channel there’s an interview where he remembers working with Chaplin; he calls himself “the happiest kid in the world,” and you can see every last ounce of that in the movie. The tenderness between The Tramp and The Kid is so pure, so uncut, that you want to swat away anyone and anything standing between them. EDIT: Jackie Coogan had a crazy life and career that you should all look into. There's a great essay about him on the Channel as well.
And the physical comedy is borderline supernatural. The comedy here doesn’t just age well—it ignores the concept of aging entirely. You could plop The Kid in front of anyone, anywhere, a century later, and they’d still laugh in the exact right spots, because Chaplin’s physical gags speak a language everybody already knows by heart. A century later, a 4K scan of this movie still had me belly-laughing alone (with my two cats) in my Astoria apartment, double-fisting Oreos like a class act—exactly how Chaplin envisioned folks would be experiencing this film one day.
I wrestled with whether to hand out the full five stars, because it can feel a little cheap to crown something a “masterpiece” just because it’s old and wearing a monocle in the Criterion Collection. But no: The Kid really is emblematic of why we still pile into theaters in the first place—humor, heartbreak, family, that forward-tilt propulsion of the medium itself, and the kind of inspiration that makes you think, “Oh, right. This is why movies exist.”
9.5/10