not evoke 17th-century England. Paul Rotha was particularly critical. In his 1930 book on the history of film, The Film Till Now, he called The Man Who Laughs a "travesty of cinematic methods," and declared that in directing it, Leni "became slack, drivelling, slovenly, and lost all sense of decoration, cinema, and artistry." The New York Times gave the film a slightly positive review, calling it "gruesome but interesting, and one of the few samples of pictorial work in which there is no handsome leading man." Modern The Man Who Laughs has received critical acclaim from modern critics as an influential German Expressionist horror film made during the height of the silent era. Roger Ebert placed The Man Who Laughs on his Great Movies list, giving it four out of four stars and declaring the film to be "one of the final treasures of German silent Expressionism," commending Leni's "mastery of visual style." Kevin Thomas from the Los Angeles Times gave the film a glowing review, describing it as "precisely the kind of all-stops-out romantic adventure that needs the silent rather than sound medium for maximum impact," and calling Leni "its perfect director, for his bravura Expressionist style lifts this tempestuous tale above the level of tear-jerker to genuinely stirring experience." Slant Magazine's Eric Henderson gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars, writing that The Man Who Laughs took Universal's series of Gothic horror films to "new and unparalleled heights in cinematic intelligence." Henderson noted the film's "obsessive dualism," citing its "fascination with bric-a-brac and its tendency towards spare, minimalist compositions" as "evidence of a stylistic schism." Time Out's Bob Baker called the film "a riot of Expressionist detail in Leni's forceful handling" anchored by Veidt's "sensitive rendering" of Gwynplaine. Baker credits Leni's "pictorial genius" as marking the film as "one of the most exhilarating of late silent cinema." Comparing the film to Leni's directorial effort from the previous year, The Cat and the Canary, the Chicago Reader's J. R. Jones found that The Man Who Laughs better demonstrates the director's "considerable dramatic and pictorial talents," with the love between Gwynplaine and Dea yielding "a sincere and extravagant sense of romance." Writing for Little White Lies, Anton Bitel describes the film as never reaching the same horror as Leni's other features, Waxworks and The Cat and the Canary, despite its sometimes grisly subject matter, likening it to "a sentimental