| Focus Features | Release Date: November 26, 2025 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
46
Mixed:
8
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
iJan 9, 2026
It is a story of family and relationships, of life’s inevitabilities, and the surprises we can nonetheless carve from those. Its gut-wrenching despair is matched by a strange optimism, a powerful embrace of the possibilities of life and love that stays with you long after the end credits roll.
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The Travers TakeNov 29, 2025
Sep 9, 2025
It’s Buckley who’s giving one of those rare turns that simply beggars belief. She swings back and forth from cast iron to porcelain. The actress is thunderous, playful, grounded and ethereal. She breaks your heart — not only when the worst befalls Agnes, but whenever she cracks a smile.
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IndieWireAug 30, 2025
Aug 30, 2025
In Hamnet . . . the two always go hand in hand: joy and fear, love and loss. One feeds into the other in a cycle as old as life itself, and unavoidable. But just as her William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) turns the pain of being caught between the two into the masterpiece that is Hamlet, Zhao harnesses those elements into something gorgeous and cathartic.
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Movie NationDec 5, 2025
Zhao, bouncing back from the Marvel “Eternals” paycheck picture/debacle, serves up a touching romance between a distracted young man of letters and a woman so attuned to nature she hunts with a pet hawk, knows the uses of every herb and tree and the incantations that go with their preparation and is thus labeled the “daughter of a witch.”
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Nov 26, 2025
In traditional terms, it could simply be described as a tearjerker. Like Buckley’s performance, though, it’s richer than that, a cross between an out-of-body experience and a full-body sob. Some will likely resist it on those grounds, understandably. But, again, framing our reactions with the feelings of others is rarely a good idea, and despite its moments of faltering, Hamnet hits like an emotional wrecking ball—devastating as it clears its path.
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Next Best PictureAug 30, 2025
It’s a masterful reflection on how grief tears us apart, and the ways in which we try to put ourselves back together again. It is a film that lingers long after the credits roll, embedding its quiet power into the viewer’s mind and heart, a meditation on loss that is both intimate and universal.
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Nov 24, 2025
Hamnet ultimately feels like the sort of mid-budget literary drama that used to be commonplace from the late 1980s through the early 2000s but has since become rare. It proves a better fit for Zhao than the blockbuster ambitions of Eternals: the intimate scale and emotional concentration suit her strengths.
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Nov 27, 2025
Hamnet is not without a few flaws, but it ultimately comes together as a strong dramatic showing for director Chloé Zhao. Anchored by a fantastic performance from Jessie Buckley, Hamnet simultaneously works as a family drama and as an exploration of how personal experience manifests in artistic expression.
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Dec 1, 2025
For all its powerful elements, though, Hamnet rings a bit hollow at its core. Perhaps the grand tragedies are just too overwhelming for some viewers to see beyond. I cried, yes, but in the end, I felt no closer to the mysterious bard—let alone to the people he loved, all those hundreds of years ago.
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Nov 25, 2025
A sensitive adaptation full of beautifully judged performances that nonetheless fails to maintain the essential appeal of its own source material: the quietly feminist retelling of one of the most retold lives in history from the perspective of a woman who was central to that life, while figuring almost nowhere in the record of it.
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Nov 29, 2025
It's true that many viewers have already fallen under its spell, but Zhao and O'Farrell have stripped away so much of what makes the novel magical – the time-travelling structure, the hypnotic prose rhythms, the internal monologues and the tiny, tangible details – that what's left is no more profound or authentic than any other costume drama set in ye olde days.
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Nov 29, 2025
As dry and matter-of-fact as Ms. Zhao was in Nomadland, which won her Oscars for best director and best picture (as she was one of its producers), she is the opposite here, driving her actors to maximal emoting. The movie purports to dip into the deep well of Shakespearean magnificence but emerges only with a ladle full of greasy schmaltz.
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