[Silent Movie is Brooks's] best picture to date. That's limited praise, surely, still this is his most organic film, the least desperately outrageous. No one sequence stands out like the punching of the horse in Saddles or the monster-doctor vaudeville routine in Frankenstein, but those were highlights amidst messy frenzy. Silent Movie takes a comic line and hews to it fairly consistently, fairly inventively.

Some viewers have assumed that, by making a silent film, Brooks is automatically challenging Chaplin and Keaton, particularly since he also plays the leading role…. [But he] is simply pursuing his parodic way—last time monster pictures, this time silent slapstick, next time maybe Ingmar Bergman. Like all parody, it's a form of homage, but that's not the same thing as competition. The only question is whether the parody amuses….

I didn't laugh at the picture as much as I just liked it. Even...