Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” released in 1936, feels startlingly modern. Ninety years after the film first flickered onto the big screens, we are still reckoning with our relationship to the machine. Maybe now more than ever we can identify with Chaplin’s character, The Little Tramp, when he is famously sucked into a huge factory machine, only to be spit out because his all-too-human foibles gum up the works.

We first meet The Tramp at his job at a factory. Our little fella works on an assembly line, tightening the same bolts over and over until the relentless pace of the factory line causes his body to twitch and spasm. The Tramp can never take a break; his boss is always watching him through screens, even tracking him taking a secret smoke in the bathroom. Perhaps as retribution for lack of “work ethic,” the boss chooses The Tramp to experiment on, in a very funny scene about a time-saving lunch machine. It’s hilarious yet dystopian, kind of Bugs Bunny Looney Tunes by way of “A Clockwork Orange.” Eventually, The Tramp has a nervous breakdown, is chased by the police and is carted away.

The inhumanity of the machine and the role the police play in capitalism is explored throughout the film in a series of delightful shenanigans. The Tramp accidentally does cocaine in prison, he’s mistaken as a leader of union organizers, he both flees the police and tries to get arrested, he roller skates on the job, and then, accidentally again, lobs the first brick at the police in a workers’ strike. Every gag is perfectly executed by a master of his craft.

But “Modern Times” is not simply a comedic send-up of industrial capitalism. It’s also a story about how people survive. The Little Tramp meets The Gamin, a teenage orphan played by Paulette Goddard. Together they get up to various schemes in an attempt to experience a semblance of that American dream, a little house with a picket fence and food on the table. The Gamin, one of Chaplin’s most realized female characters, is a spitfire who has no choice but not to let the system get her down.

Chaplin’s genius was to blend marvelously intricate and delightful physical comedy with heart-moving pathos, creating one of our first languages of cinema. His Little Tramp was born out of his own extraordinarily difficult childhood. His parents were music hall performers who separated when he was very young. Chaplin spent time in the workhouse as a child, and when he was 14, his mother was committed to a mental institution. Out of those experiences came The Little Tramp, a character who could be down and out without ever being defeated, a person capable of finding dignity, mischief and tenderness in the most trying circumstances.

Like Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot in “Playtime,” Chaplin’s Little Tramp pokes holes in the promises of modernity and machines, and in doing so, re-humanizes his audience. Tati shows us that human beings can never become machines because we are gloriously messy creatures drawn toward organic liveliness rather than cold efficiency. Chaplin’s “Modern Times” asks: Who does the machine serve? If all this machinery serves a master who cares more about the accumulation of wealth than about the suffering of the people doing the work, perhaps the machines deserve to break.

The critique of industrial capitalism in “Modern Times” and its sympathy for workers led some to accuse Chaplin of communist sympathies. He was later investigated by the FBI, and during the political climate of the early Cold War, he became increasingly unwelcome in the United States. In 1952, while traveling abroad, Chaplin learned that his permission to reenter the country had been revoked. Chaplin predicted he would be back to the states and making films in about six months but it was 20 years before he returned. In 1972, he was awarded an honorary academy award at the 44th Oscars and the audience gave him a 12-minute standing ovation, still the longest ovation ever at the Oscars.

Nearly a century after its release, “Modern Times” continues to be heralded as one of the greatest films of all time. Perhaps every generation feels that “Modern Times” is especially relevant to their moment, our current time included. The Little Tramp is no hero, nor even the hero we deserve. He’s something much more, a celebration of our humanity and connection. The machine may be enormous, the boss indifferent, and the police waiting around the corner, but The Little Tramp also remains. He abides; he keeps going. And so does The Gamin.

“Modern Times” screens at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 29, as part of the Tuesday Nights at the Movies series at Woodmere, 9201 Germantown Ave. in Chestnut Hill. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and light refreshments will be provided prior to the screening. Tuesday Nights at the Movies screenings are free to the public, but donations are greatly appreciated.