The most credit goes to Shakespeare himself and Laurence Olivier does credit to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, delivering a magnificent transformation of text into cinema.

  Splendid acting, direction and diction work together to make Shakespearean dialogue understandable.  And the more you comprehend the greater the reward, for his writing is rich in meaning, humor, wit and literary devices.  Subtitles may be helpful.

  Appropriately not overly cinematic since the written word is the star here.  Yet cinematic passages are present and add greatly.  In one segment the camera rises from the depths of Ophelia’s despair, ascends even higher up the castle stairs, pierces the sky and even Hamlet’s mind, then settles back to record the most profound suicide/revenge contemplation ever written  –  To be or not to be…

        » Brent Chastain, Top3films.com