O.K. if you've never seen another movie before.

Rating: 2/10 (18 February 2012)

Why are people gushing over this? It is nothing but a barely competent collection of the clichés that people think of when they think of a "silent movie" but really are ones that mark third-rate commercial entertainment, which this is. It's thin, it's badly acted, and it's *wrongly* shot. If you're going to ape your betters (which in this case would include Pabst, von Stroheim, Murnau, Lubitsch, and Chaplin), then you should have the decency to study what they do and try to imitate their style.
This is crap. I'd like to believe the acclaim for it is a joke, but I fear it's not. I guess people don't watch things like "City Lights" any more and don't recognize this for the pandering garbage it is. And it *is* pandering; never for one frame do you get the feeling that these people don't think they're archly "slumming" and being "edgy" by shooting without sound despite the fact that their vision is utterly pedestrian and probably wouldn't have made it off the second bill in 1928.
Oh, and they use "Pennies from Heaven" with no awareness whatsoever of its resonance. I hope Dennis Potter comes back from the great beyond and smacks them on the head.