Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

Given the impossibility of crafting William Shakespeare into a believable human being, the film is an honorable try.

Screen Daily by Jonathan Romney

A tender, intelligent imagining of the playwright in retirement.

Screen International by Jonathan Romney

A tender, intelligent imagining of the playwright in retirement.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

All Is True is sentimental, theatrical, likable – and unfashionable.

The Telegraph by Tim Robey

All is True is a tongue-in-cheek title all the same, for a script which fills in factual gaps with its own blatant leaps of imagination: they’re just far more respectful and illuminating leaps.

Film Threat by Alan Ng

All is True does justice to the Bard, and devout fans of Shakespeare are sure to find a place for it, if not on the shelf alongside his classics, but in a small place in their hearts.

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.

Entertainment Weekly by Chris Nashawaty

Even if this handsome film runs a bit snoozy and dull at times, it’s wondefully acted and clearly made with no shortage of compassion and love.

RogerEbert.com by Odie Henderson

Say what you want about his onscreen vices, but Branagh has always been a charitable director and it really shows here.

The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo

Solid, creative melodrama is nothing to sneeze at, but it can’t compete with enduring genius.

Slant Magazine by Wes Greene

It’s an unfussy, intimate chamber drama that’s fearless in confronting the attitudes of its exalted subject.

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.

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

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.

TheWrap by Elizabeth Weitzman

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.

Slate

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.

Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele

A fitfully engaging, well-intentioned but disappointing original biographical drama.

Observer by Oliver Jones

Forget all of it being true; I would have settled for some of it being interesting.

Variety by Peter Debruge

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.