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100The richest and most satisfying romantic movie of the year. It's really about two great loves at once -- the love of life and of art -- and the way that Shakespeare, like no writer before him, transformed the one into the other.
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100I was carried along by the wit, the energy and a surprising sweetness.
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100If she (Paltrow) were the only good thing about Shakespeare in Love, it still would have been worth seeing; that she is the crown jewel in a glittering tiara of a film studded with writing and acting gems testifies to the deep pleasures to be found in this remarkable movie.
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Anyone not romantically inclined going into Shakespeare in Love surely will be by the end.
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88Inordinately clever, sprightly romantic comedy.
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88Its brazen mixture of the comic and dramatic, the high and low and the emotional and intellectual is positively Shakespearean.
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88Accessibly brainy screen charmer.
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88The whole ensemble has a hoot with this material, and their joy is contagious.
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75Not a great film, but it's an excuse to have an evening of pure enjoyment with a little culture painlessly mixed in.
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50This romantic farce has a talented cast and energy to spare, but somehow the ingredients don't burn as brightly as one would expect from such promising ingredients.
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90The result is a film that is as witty, astute, and romantic as its timeless subject.
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70This delightful, fast-paced and entirely fictional imagining of Shakespeare's life during the writing of "Romeo and Juliet" brims with witticisms predicated on the determination to have a rollicking good time exploring the link between libido and creativity.
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89The end result is a delightful, though a smidge too long, reminder of one of the reasons we so enjoy going to the movies: perchance to dream.
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Like "Amadeus," Shakespeare in Love works splendidly as an appreciation of an artist in the heat of creation, and it breathes life into "Romeo and Juliet."
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100One of those entertaining confections that's so pleasing to the eye and ear you'd have to be a genuine Scrooge to struggle against it.
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100Shakespeare meets Sherlock, and makes for pure enchantment in the inspired conjecture behind Shakespeare in Love.
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100The true, rare glamour of the piece is its revival of two precious movie tropes: the flourishing of words for their majesty and fun, and--in the love play between Fiennes and his enchantress--the kindling of a playfully adult eroticism.
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100Paltrow and Fiennes are so good and the script, referencing not only "Romeo and Juliet" but "Twelfth Night," is so consistently intelligent that seduction is inevitable.
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90The beauty of this extremely clever movie, directed with fleet, robust theatricality by John Madden, is how deftly it manages to work on multiple levels.
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90Exquisitely acted, tightly directed and impressively assembled.
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90The movie becomes something quite rare and magical: a text about a text that is also full of life. In other words, it's a true first: It's both postmodern and fun!
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90It's easy to suspend disbelief and embrace this historically creative fiction, whose clever relationship to what's known and what's unresolved is part of what makes it so intriguing and so romantic.
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80Delivers the goods, if the goods you're in the market for happen to be a clever romance concerning William Shakespeare that's unlikely to cause anyone to reassess their notions of Shakespeare, romance, or enjoyment.
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These filmmakers have taken a historical figure and made him into a hot-blooded romantic hero. Shakespeare did that a time or two himself.
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70Good fun, though not more than up-market situation comedy studded with the usual leaps out of period-speak to swipe at contemporary Hollywood.
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60A corny, old-fashioned backstage farce.
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40It soon becomes evident just how inane a film this is.
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100Some scholars may scowl, some lowbrows may scoff. But, like wordwise Will, these filmmakers know how to win a crowd -- from the queen down to the groundlings, from the sky above to the stage below. Bravo! [5 December 1998, Friday, p.A]
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100These are the heights of cinematic achievement.
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100It's a rollicking good time, full of genuine emotional pull and incandescent acting, and anchored by a passionate love for the theater itself which puts most human liaisons--including Shakespeare and Viola's -- to shame.