The reviews are all favourable, and most are warmly so. The praise gathers on Olivier himself, doing three jobs at once: critics find his Hamlet intelligent, clearly spoken and free of wasted gesture, and several credit his direction with making Elsinore feel like a place rather than a set. The supporting cast is called near-perfect more than once. The later reviews add admiration for the monochrome photography, the sound and the Ghost, reading the film as closer to noir than to filmed theatre.
Where critics part is on the whole against the parts. The New Yorker thinks the fine moments do not quite add up and places it below Olivier’s Henry V, though it still recommends the film. Empire notes that some of Olivier’s contemporaries objected to the cuts made to the text. The spread is narrow: one measured recommendation among six strong ones, and nobody dissenting outright.