50
All Is True does not work as a film, but as a memorial to a writer whose shadow we are still working in today, and an expression of yearning to know who he really was, it has an odd vitality that cannot be completely dismissed.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
75
Entertainment Weekly by Dana Schwartz
There is a beautiful, surprising, and entirely engrossing film within this movie; it’s just almost impossible to find among the establishing shots of ponds and endless subplots of real-life characters introduced for seemingly no other reason than to help make this movie perfect for sophomore year high school classes.
50
The result is a portrait that’s equally sullen and playful, clever and confused; for all its pleasures, All Is True never amounts to the sum of all the many parts that Shakespeare may have played in his time or thereafter.
50
It’s hard to say whether Branagh is concerned about getting things wrong, or of being disrespectful. But he never finds the freedom he’s unlocked so often in Shakespeare’s own works. His ambition is honorable, but without substance, it becomes merely the shadow of a dream.
80
Screen International by Jonathan Romney
A tender, intelligent imagining of the playwright in retirement.
25
Forget all of it being true; I would have settled for some of it being interesting.
80
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
All Is True is sentimental, theatrical, likable – and unfashionable.
20
The result is a revisionist fiasco, too dense with Shakespeare allusions for casual moviegoers, and too fast and loose with the facts for those who know a thing or two about the man. In short, All Is True takes the English language’s most gifted dramatist and reduces his sunset years to a sloppy soap opera.
50
Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele
A fitfully engaging, well-intentioned but disappointing original biographical drama.
60
The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy
A labor of love, to be sure, but a simple, small-scaled domestic drama with none of the broad appeal of the hugely popular "Shakespeare in Love" of 1998, this thoroughly respectable Sony Classics pickup will command the interest mostly of older-skewing art house habituees.