“The acting in Hamnet feels stagey until the movie reaches an actual stage, at which point the earthen, feral, ardent work that Jessie Buckley has been doing reaches its apogee. Agnes witnesses, at last, what her absent husband has been up to in the wake of their family’s tragedy. And the way Buckley registers what’s before her is one of the great acts of beholding I’ve ever seen.
“Her spectator’s journey from rude belligerence to almost drunken bewilderment to chatty hypnosis to biblical revelation was pretty much mine. Through tears, I laughed at the odyssey of Buckley’s facial thesaurus. At some point, she extends a hand up to the proscenium and the actor (Noah Jupe) onstage clasps it, and the bereft epiphany that blasts out of her explains why Buckley’s work in the rest of the movie had felt so primitive: This is a human discovering the fire they call art.” — N.Y. Times critic Wesley Morris, posted on 12.11.