Film

An imaginative and hilarious send-up of the modern industrialized world, Charlie Chaplin’s final silent film (enlivened by bits of inventive sound design) casts his classic Little Tramp character as a factory worker tightening bolts on an assembly line. When he suffers a mishap in an experiment with an automatic feeding machine, his resulting nervous breakdown lands him in a mental institution. Mixing the joyfulness of Chaplin’s comedy gags with a scathing satire of modern bureaucracy and the mechanization of society, Modern Times remains the funniest of the comedian’s social critiques.