Empire by Angie Errigo

Inspired, innovative, stunning, with unforgettable performances and images, this is up there with the great screen Shakespeares. The playwright surely would be thrilled with it in its full-blooded vigour.

Variety by Guy Lodge

Fearsomely visceral and impeccably performed, it’s a brisk, bracing update, even as it remains exquisitely in period.

The Telegraph by Robbie Collin

Justin Kurzel’s blistering, blood-sticky new screen version of Macbeth unseams the famous Shakespearean tragedy open from the nave to the chops, letting its insides spill out across the rock underfoot.

Washington Post by Michael O'Sullivan

This cinematic Macbeth possesses a terrible beauty, evoking fear, sadness, awe and confusion. Presented with the aesthetic of a dark comic book, it’s also a mournful masterpiece, rendering Shakespeare’s spectacle with all the sorrow and majesty that it deserves.

TheWrap by Inkoo Kang

Fassbender manages to find the psychological throughline that makes Macbeth’s increasing mental deterioration — a development that can feel overly formalistic, not to mention moralistic — wholly convincing.

The Playlist by Jessica Kiang

Aided by intensely committed performances from a uniformly brilliant cast, all fielding Scottish accents, Kurzel's genius is to be able to find clean lines of dramatic connection and motivation within the existing text and then to interpret those imaginatively, without becoming simplistic and without compromise.

Village Voice by Alan Scherstuhl

This is a Macbeth to sink into and shrink from, not one to parse.

Los Angeles Times by Gary Goldstein

It's the gripping and verbally deft cast, led by a swaggering, formidably brooding Fassbender and a searing and poignant Cotillard, that may emerge most memorable here.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Calvin Wilson

Macbeth takes liberties with the particulars of the Shakespeare play, but is fascinatingly true to its spirit.

The Hollywood Reporter by Leslie Felperin

An intensely compelling work.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

There is a lot of sound and fury in this Macbeth, but not without meaning. It’s not perhaps a very subtle version, and I felt that Kurzel should have perhaps worked more closely with Fassbender with the contours of his speeches, and shown the painful mind-changing and nerve-losing in the early stages. There is an operatic verve.

CineVue by John Bleasdale

Artfully, his films tracks the tragic decline of a good man gone bad, who finds murder too insignificant not to do again and again, a worthy addition to William Shakespeare's ever growing filmography.

Hitfix by Gregory Ellwood

Beyond the performances, this new “Macbeth” benefits from Kurzel’s inspired eye, the increasingly impressive talents of cinematographer Adam Arkapaw (“True Detective”) and Fiona Crombie’s period-loving production design. The world they have created for this tragedy may overwhelm, but it's certainly impossible to forget.

Screen Daily

One of the most consistently engrossing elements of Macbeth is Kurzel’s vision of that harsh world, helped by a tight unit of costume, design and camera.

IndieWire

This particular tale of sound and fury signifies more than nothing, but only just.