Critic Reviews

• Kyle Smith, New York Post

  Take a couple of friends to see it, and the amount you spend may exceed the amount the filmmakers did.

• Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times

  An earnest experiment in don't-ask-don't-tell drama as indebted to shirtlessness as to iambic pentameter.

• Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News

  Unfortunately, "modern" additions (like the soldiers' YouTube videos and some social media moments) feel clunky, and a necessarily shortened approach trips the movie up...

• Rex Reed, New York Observer

  Private Romeo will undoubtedly be regarded by some as a curio, but it's a sweet, sympathetic and surprising one, highly recommended to the adventurous spirit in an enlightened and changing world.

• Aaron Hillis, Village Voice

  A pandering coming-of-ager about sexual identity and equality.

• Ronnie Scheib, Variety

  A dynamite ensemble cast of young actors invests the Bard's poetry with energetic immediacy.

• Brandon Judell, CultureCatch

  In the end, Private Romeo, with its indie budget, handsomely captures the uncompromising nature of young love, and "it ends with a long deep sigh, like the breeze of the evening," as Samuel Coleridge said it should.

• David Noh, Film Journal International

  Get a bunch of male hotties reciting Shakespeare's most immortal love poetry to one another and you have a hot movie, right? Wrong!

• Diego Costa, Slant Magazine

  Private Romeo feels more like a side project from the producers of Glee than some kind of novel queering of Shakespeare's text.

Read all 9 critic reviews