Synopsis
London, June 29th, 1613. The Globe Theater, ran by the famous playwright William Shakespeare, accidentally burns to ashes. Seriously affected, he stops writing and returns to his hometown, where his wife Anne and daughters Judith and Susanna get surprised to hear he intends to stay there definitively, after two decades working in the capital, neglecting his sincere affections for them.
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Cast
- Kenneth BranaghWilliam Shakespeare
- Judi DenchAnne Shakespeare
- Ian McKellenEarl of Southampton
- Kathryn WilderJudith Shakespeare
- Lydia WilsonSusanna Hall
- Hadley FraserJohn Hall
- Jack Colgrave HirstTom Quiney
- John DagleishRafe Smith
- Sean FoleyJohn Lane
- Gerard HoranBen Jonson
Recommendations
- 80
The Guardian
All Is True is sentimental, theatrical, likable – and unfashionable. - 80
Screen Daily
A tender, intelligent imagining of the playwright in retirement. - 75
Entertainment Weekly
There is a beautiful, surprising, and entirely engrossing film within this movie; it’s just almost impossible to find among the establishing shots of ponds and endless subplots of real-life characters introduced for seemingly no other reason than to help make this movie perfect for sophomore year high school classes. - 60
The Hollywood Reporter
A labor of love, to be sure, but a simple, small-scaled domestic drama with none of the broad appeal of the hugely popular "Shakespeare in Love" of 1998, this thoroughly respectable Sony Classics pickup will command the interest mostly of older-skewing art house habituees. - 50
Los Angeles Times
A fitfully engaging, well-intentioned but disappointing original biographical drama. - 50
Slate
All Is True does not work as a film, but as a memorial to a writer whose shadow we are still working in today, and an expression of yearning to know who he really was, it has an odd vitality that cannot be completely dismissed. - 50
TheWrap
It’s hard to say whether Branagh is concerned about getting things wrong, or of being disrespectful. But he never finds the freedom he’s unlocked so often in Shakespeare’s own works. His ambition is honorable, but without substance, it becomes merely the shadow of a dream. - 50
IndieWire
The result is a portrait that’s equally sullen and playful, clever and confused; for all its pleasures, All Is True never amounts to the sum of all the many parts that Shakespeare may have played in his time or thereafter.
