The Great Dictator in 1945, it became the most popular film of the year, with admissions of 8,280,553. Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance concludes his lengthy examination of the film, in his book "Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema", by asserting the film's importance among the great film satires. Vance writes, "Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" survives as a masterful integration of comedy, politics and satire. It stands as Chaplin's most self-consciously political work and the cinema's first important satire." There is no critical consensus on the relationship between Chaplin's earlier Tramp character and the film's Jewish barber, but the trend is to view the barber
The Dictator (2012 film) uneven but consistently provocative, "The Dictator" is a decent entry in the poli-slapstick comedy genre." On Metacritic, the film was given score of 58 out of 100 based on 41 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore during opening weekend gave the film an average grade of "C" on a scale ranging from A+ to F. Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" gave the film three stars out of a possible four, saying, ""The Dictator" is funny, in addition to being obscene, disgusting, scatological, vulgar, crude and so on. Having seen Sacha Baron Cohen promoting it on