[In Silent Movie] Brooks has concocted a talkie with a gimmick. The gimmickry here involves parodies of silent-movie jokes and simplistic plotting. The absence of realistic sound and speech is complete with the exception of one word—spoken, of course, by the mime Marcel Marceau. Above all, it's an oral comedy, with its verbal humor obvious in signs, names, and title cards. Like Blazing Saddles, the Brooks film this most closely parallels, Silent Movie is clearly the work of gag writers…. It's even more clearly the work of Mel Brooks, not merely as the co-author, director, and leading man, but also as the overall comic persona, replete with his satiric eye, sophisticated social perception, gut approach, and unfortunate tendency toward the scatological, not to mention his gift for the outrageous and—though I have sworn off the word as blurbily destructive—the hilarious….

[There] are sight gags galore...