Playtime updates silent-comedy technique in a brilliant sound film. Penelope Gilliatt wrote this appreciation in the New Yorker: "Playtime is to be cherished. It is a new step in slapstick comedy: gay, cinematically new, as if the old Mack Sennett form had been reborn as a fledgling....Tati thinks that the days when films revolved round comic heroes are over. The days of Keaton and Chaplin are gone....Playtime sees the same world of prankishness and physical catastrophe and victimization...the difference is that Tati finds his film's world inhabited by everyone, not by a single comic star. The film notices in businessmen and tourists and dandy waiters the identical adherence to life and insanely funny concentration on small private projects that used to belong in vaudeville exclusively to the comic at the top of the bill. Tati's famous figure of M. Hulot is still there...but his importance has receded."