The hardest I laughed during a movie all year, and it wasn't close.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Mar 14, 2025

An amusing and sometimes touching ode to the vagaries of making theatre.

| Feb 25, 2025

...a project as bizarre as it is fascinating. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 24, 2025

A moderately funny idea played out at length to mild applause.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Feb 22, 2025

High art collides with low expectations, resulting in something like a renewed faith in humanity.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 21, 2025

In 2021, two British actors furloughed by the pandemic, were playing an online video game when they came upon a virtual outdoor theatre and decided to put on a play. This documentary chronicles their weird and ultimately triumphant journey.

| Original Score: A | Feb 21, 2025

With a steady flow of bizarre, absurdist comedy and some moving moments of frank conversation, this backstage yarn is a gleeful crowd-pleaser.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 13, 2025

Grand Theft Hamlet essentially offers a longitudinal screen capture. Parsed from 300 hours of material, it boasts a contemporary twist on backstage documentary, albeit as a one-note joke.

| Feb 11, 2025

It really shouldn't work as an exercise in absurdity, and yet at times it is so touching and heartfelt.

| Feb 11, 2025

Not just one of the most deeply inventive and thoughtful documentaries of the 2020s so far, but it’s an especially moving tribute to Shakespeare’s work, performed by a motley crew of anonymous strangers seeking videogame refuge during the pandemic.

| Original Score: 9.5/10 | Feb 5, 2025

The overall effect is not one of generosity and collaboration... but rather of two artists exploiting and mythologizing their underdog story in real-time. 

| Feb 4, 2025

Those who love the documentary Grand Theft Hamlet will call it a brilliant and creative conceit. Those a bit more skeptical will call it a gimmick. I think they’re all right, and it’s both.

| Jan 24, 2025

Grand Theft Hamlet wrings lots of grim laughs out of this material. However, there’s also something unexpectedly relevant about watching Sam and Mark try to craft some unity in a virtual world of guns and debauchery.

| Jan 22, 2025

How directors Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls find ways to have the audience eventually get past the off-the-wall layer in front of them and recognize what’s really going on is impressive.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 22, 2025

The ingenuity laced with pure madness that gave rise to this play is something that may well inspire your next creative jag, whether you’re a gamer or a theater nerd.

| Jan 21, 2025

The rich comedy of Grand Theft Hamlet drips mostly from the mix between the actors’ nonplussed dialogue over the absurd action and the game’s preposterous violence, uncanny glitchiness, and open-to-the-public messiness.

| Jan 21, 2025

If all the world’s a stage, why can’t that stage be GTA Online?

| Jan 21, 2025

Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls' Grand Theft Hamlet is a funny and charming use of its titular game, even if it ultimately feels lacking in its pacing.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 18, 2025

It's an inspiring film, proving that creativity endures, art will find a way, and the show must go on.

| Jan 18, 2025

If there is one disappointing element of this moving, amusing, sad and memorable film it’s that it isn’t five hours long.

| Jan 18, 2025