of deliberately half-intelligible wording for comic effect points the way towards Adenoid Hynkel's speeches in The Great Dictator. According to film composer David Raksin, he wrote the music as a young man wanting to make a name for himself. Chaplin would sit, often in the washroom, humming tunes and telling Raksin to "take this down". Raksin's job was to turn the humming into a score and create timings and synchronization that fit the situations. Chaplin was a violinist and had some musical knowledge, but he was not an orchestrator and was unfamiliar with synchronization. Along with Edward B. Powell, Raksin did receive screen credit for the music arrangements. Raksin later created scores for films including Laura and The Day After. Reception Modern Times is often hailed as one of Chaplin's greatest achievements, and it remains one of his most popular films. It holds an approval rating of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 108 reviews, with a weighted average of 9.4/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "A slapstick skewering of industrialized America, Modern Times is as politically incisive as it is laugh-out-loud hilarious." Metacritic reports an aggregated score of 96/100 based on 4 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Naming it the Best Film of the 30s Decade, Flickside writes, "Chaplin's Modern Times is a thoughtful critique on the anxieties of modernization dealt with pathos and humour." Contemporary reviews were very positive. Frank Nugent of The New York Times wrote, "'Modern Times' has still the same old Charlie, the lovable little fellow whose hands and feet and prankish eyebrows can beat an irresistible tattoo upon an audience's funnybone or hold it still, taut beneath the spell of human tragedy ... Time has not changed his genius." Variety called it "grand fun and sound entertainment." Film Daily wrote, "Charlie Chaplin has scored one of his greatest triumphs." John Mosher of The New Yorker wrote that Chaplin "manufactures some superb laughs ... In all, it's a rambling sketch, a little at loose ends at times, sometimes rather slight in effect, and now and then secure in its rich, old-fashioned funniness." Burns Mantle called the film "another hilariously rowdy success." Writing for The Spectator in 1936, Graham Greene strongly praised the film, noting that although there had always been a bit of a dated feel to his previous works, Chaplin "has at last definitely entered the contemporary scene". Greene noted that whereas prior Chaplin films