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It knows how to scare and keep the viewer glued to the screen, though without ever truly revolutionizing the genre. Disturbing, gloomy, and twisted, it moves with an engaging rhythm. Yet it also carries the sense that what we see here is something already familiar.

It's a commendable film, with cinematography and period atmosphere that feel striking and recognizable, but it ultimately lacks real transcendence. The result is a solid work-effective in its immediate impact, though somewhat overrated, leaving less of a lasting impression than one might hope.

True to its trademarks, the film unleashes action in spades, throws in a few moments clearly engineered to make us shed a tear, and paints on a canvas as broad as it is uneven. The opening is so lethargic it almost feels like an intimate drama... until the real fireworks arrive: a claustrophobic underwater sequence and an aerial stunt closer to madness than physics. Even so, it never reaches the heights of its finest chapters. Worst of all, the constant explanations and didactic flashbacks-treating the audience as if they were inattentive students-end up killing the pace and taming the surprise. In the end, a story that boasts of the impossible leaves us feeling that the only truly incredible thing is the audience's patience.

A hundred years searching for gold... and in the end, all we got was a boiled boot and a couple of bread rolls doing a tap dance. The Gold Rush still shines a century later, though perhaps that's only because celluloid ages better than second-hand footwear. Chaplin, master of turning misery into comedy, makes loneliness and despair look like a variety show; no one before him had managed to make hunger quite so entertaining.

A masterpiece, some say; just a gag with boots and rolls, others reply. Either way, Chaplin proves that if you don't strike gold in the mountains, you can always find it in the audience's laughter... or at least in the ticket price.