Metacritic reviews

Those who thought "Shakespeare In Love" was as good as it gets in intelligent costume romantic comedy will find that director Richard Eyre and writer Jeffrey Hatcher have taken the form to a higher level.

This skillfully acted, handsomely crafted frock piece toys cleverly with gender confusion and sexual identity.

A film that, despite being about theatre itself, is remarkably cinematic and entirely unafraid to revel in the English language.

Expertly directed by Richard Eyre (Iris) from Jeffrey Hatcher's play, the film is bawdy fun.

It's a marvelous premise, and Crudup's serpentine performance has a venomous grace. But Jeffrey Hatcher's screenplay too often sacrifices psychological insight for bogus theatricality.

Crudup, whose features have the appropriate delicacy, plays Ned with complete conviction; it’s difficult to imagine anyone else succeeding as well.

For every thing that Stage Beauty does right, it fumbles at least one other element, resulting in a movie-going experience that is of the glass half-full/half-empty variety.

A celebration of the theater that tends to drag the moment it's out of drag.

Second-rate bawdiness--that is, bawdiness without the wit of Boccaccio or Shakespeare or even Tom Stoppard--is more infantile than funny, and I’m not sure that the American playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, who concocted this piece for the stage and then adapted it into a movie, is even second-rate.

Most frustrating, Stage Beauty fumbles XX/XY politics at every turn.