Reviews:

“The movies have finally done it. They have made a screen version that is not only excellent in itself, but a decided improvement over a legitimate presentation. Shakespeare has become a bore to so many high school and college students (through no fault of his own) that it is a positive pleasure to report on Irving Thalberg’s MGM, has made out of Romeo and Juliet. It is beautiful, it is authentic, it is moving, and when all is said and done, it is still Shakespeare.”
Scholastic, September 19, 1936

“Critics consider Romeo and Juliet a triumph of motion picture art, very possibly one of the finest pictures ever made in Hollywood. The most acidulous [critics] admitted Miss Shearer’s Juliet to be a triumph, garlanded Leslie Howard for a curbed disciplined performance of Romeo. Also, they delighted in the Mercutio of John Barrymore. Romeo and Juliet is Hollywood’s best joust with Shakespeare to date. Skilled performances, knowing delivery of the famous lines, an acute sense that cheers would be grudged, jeers easy, combining to set alight the talents of all concerned.”
The Literary Digest, August 15, 1936

“Metro the magnificent has loosed its technical magic upon Will Shakespeare and has fashioned for his Romeo and Juliet a jeweled setting in which the deep beauty of his romance glows and sparkles and gleams with breathless radiance. Never before in all its centuries has the play ever received such a handsome production as that which was unveiled last night at the Astor Theatre. All that the camera’s scope superb photography and opulent costuming could give it has been given here. Ornate, but not garish, extravagant, but in perfect taste, expensive, but not overwhelming, the picture reflects greatly upon its producers and upon the screen as a whole. It is a dignified, sensitive and entirely admirable Shakespearean-not Hollywoodian production.

Miss Shearer was not at her best in the balcony scene. With more pleasure and with a sense that this memory will endure the longer, do we recall Miss Shearer’s tender and womanly perverse Juliet during her farewell scene with Romeo before his flight to Mantua. Bright, too, with recollection of her surrender to uncertainty, fear and suspicion before swallowing the potion, and of that scene in which she finds her lover dead beside her in the tomb. Miss Shearer has played these, whatever her earlier mistakes, with sincerity and effect.”
Frank S. Nugent in the New York Times, August 21, 1936

“With rare good taste and surprisingly resourcefulness the screen has translated Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into a distinguished and beautiful photoplay. The singing measures of the tragedy have been framed into sumptuous pageantry. The acting, always effective, rise at tomes to genuine brilliance. You will find it the cinema’s most successful and engaging obeisance to the Bard. Of all the splendid performances in the film, that of Mr. Barrymore’s is outstanding. Miss Shearer is remarkably good. She is inclined to coyness at the star, but from the balcony scene on she plays with simple intensity and profound assurance. In her most ambitious role she does the finest acting of her career. As Romeo, Leslie Howard is almost too restrained, although he conspires with Miss Shearer to make the lover’s meeting incidents of haunting beauty. The screen version of Romeo and Juliet has flaws, but they are trivial when weighed against the beauty and completing power of the production.”
Howard Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune, August 21, 1936

“Mr. Irving Thalberg, producer, showman, and visionary has evolved a picture that should be timeless as the story it tells, gives him top billing in this magnificent effort. It is a picture born to be re-issues. It seems to this humble reviewer that, once seen, it must be seen again. The superb acting throughout of a cast of picture favorites is another thing that you’ll want to view again and again-everything about the production will make you proud to be a movie fan. There isn’t anyone we can think of who will not love it, who will not wonder why Shakespeare had been so long neglected or viewed with such a pedantic awe.”
Helen Gwynn in the Hollywood Reporter, July 16, 1936

“On Romeo and Juliet in the screen version I can only report that if like a play as it stands, and so not require something far and indefinable and somehow beyond, you will like it; if not, not. The picture is done well, but it seems a little more than that. Norma Shearer is rather unappetizingly made up, but neither bad nor good and)surprisingly enough) usually content with just being in there trying; Leslie Howard has grace, intelligence and a flair for likes, but the sophomorics of the Romeo are too much for him and there are times when that sensitive horse’s face of his, wrapped in these disguises must lead to unfortunate giggles. But as Mercutio John Barrymore is the real study. I hardly know what to say about it, but am sure there will never be seen on the board so much scenery chewing and rubber face trickery until the day they put ‘Lear’ into Billy Minsky houses.”
Otto Ferguson in The New Republic, September 2, 1936