Limelight cruelly exposes the limitations of Chaplin as producer, for it is everything, most of the time, a movie shouldn't be: overwritten, underdirected, slowly paced, monotonously photographed, fumblingly cut—and oh so dreary, far beyond any justification from the milieu, a penury of the soul…. The first ten minutes, roughly, are good Chaplin, relatively pure cinema…. Up to this point, or shortly thereafter, the situation is managed with a fine balance of tragic and comic, dramatic and ludicrous, theatrical and cinematic. But from here on, Chaplin abandons all effort to keep his invention within these disciplined commutations of method. The whole gorgeous potentiality breaks down, washes away in a welter of tears, archness, smut, coincidental meetings, Pagliacci closeups, and in talk, talk, talk. For interminable stretches he either sets his camera while two or three actors play out a scene virtually face front, with no cuts to benefit...