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Wikipedia writes:

Hamlet is a 1948 British film adaptation of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, directed by and starring Sir Laurence Olivier. Hamlet was Olivier's second film as director, and also the second of his three Shakespeare films. It is the only one of Olivier's directorial efforts to be filmed in black and white, and was the first British film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.^[1]

Olivier's Hamlet is the Shakespeare film that has received the most prestigious accolades, winning the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Actor. However, it proved controversial among Shakespearean purists, who felt that Olivier had made too many alterations and excisions to the four-hour play by cutting nearly two hours worth of content. Milton Shulman wrote in The Evening Standard "To some it will be one of the greatest films ever made, to others a deep disappointment. Laurence Olivier leaves no doubt that he is one of our greatest living actors...his liberties with the text, however, are sure to disturb many."^[2]

IMBD writes:

William Shakespeare's tale of tragedy of murder and revenge in the royal halls of medieval Denmark. Claudius, brother to the King, conniving with the Queen, poisons the monarch and seizes the throne, taking the widowed Gertrude for his bride. Hamlet, son of the murdered King, mournful of his father's death and mother's hasty marriage, is confronted by the ghost of the late King who reveals the manner of his murder. Seeking revenge, Hamlet recreates the monstrous deed in a play with the help of some traveling actors to torment the conscience of the evil Claudius. In a visit with his mother, Hamlet expresses his anger and disappointment concerning her swiftly untimed marriage. Thinking a concealed spy in his mother's chamber to be the lurking Claudius, he mistakenly kills the meddling counselor, Polonius, father of Ophelia and Laertes. Claudius, on the pretext that Hamlet will be endangered by his subjects for the murder of Polonius, sends the prince to England. Written by alfiehitchie

Terrance Rafferty:

Reviewing Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film of Hamlet, James Agee—then a critic at Time—wrote: “The man who brings Hamlet, his friends, and his antagonists to life has tackled one of the most fascinating and most thankless tasks in show business. . . . Very likely there will never be a production good enough to provoke less argument than praise.” This Hamlet, on its release, seemed to be that unlikely production: the reviews were almost universally rhapsodic, and the film won four Oscars, including Best Actor and Best Picture (the first non-American production to take the Academy’s top prize). The whips and scorns of time, however, have unjustly diminished the stature of this great film. The consensus nowadays is that Hamlet is the most problematic of Olivier’s three self-directed Shakespeare movies—that Henry V (1945) is a more vibrant and imaginative piece of filmmaking, and that Richard III (1954) records a more memorable performance. By comparison to those clear triumphs, this Hamlet, once so celebrated, has taken on the quality of a forlorn and nearly forgotten thing, like Yorick’s skull.

Hamlet is, of course, by far the most difficult of the Shakespeare plays that Olivier brought to the screen, and the tragedy’s bottomless, irresolvable ambiguity may account for the instability of critical opinion about the movie over the years. What seemed, at the time, minor quibbles about Olivier’s interpretation of the play and of the title character now dominate discussion of his Hamlet. In cutting this immensely long play to a running time of just over two and a half hours, Olivier and his screenplay collaborator, Alan Dent, eliminated some fairly prominent characters (notably Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Fortinbras) and even sacrificed a couple of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquies (“O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” and “How all occasions do inform against me”), and thus made themselves vulnerable to charges of butchering the Bard. (Olivier, in answer to such criticisms, took to characterizing his film as merely “a study in Hamlet.”) And some detractors focus on the central performance, noting gleefully that the star, at 40, was rather long in the tooth for the role. Olivier left himself wide open to that attack, too: As Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, he cast an actress (Eileen Herlie) who was in fact thirteen years his junior.

But if you watch this Hamlet with an unprejudiced eye, the objections seem trivial and mean-spirited. It’s a thrillingly intelligent and moving film, photographed in an audacious style that somehow manages to evoke the play’s unique, enigmatic mixture of emotional turbulence and intellectual austerity. Desmond Dickinson’s deep-focus camera roams freely through Elsinore and its craggy windswept environs, sometimes traveling through vast empty spaces before finding the poor human characters it seeks, and then fixing them with a spectral, eerily detached gaze. The restless but oddly serene camera movement is unnerving because it feels subjective yet we can’t quite identify the subject. Something—as implacable as a monster in a horror movie—is stalking these people, observing them from impossible heights and across great distances, while itself remaining out of sight. In Olivier’s Hamlet, we seem to be watching human behavior, in all its awful futility, through the cold, unblinking eyes of God.

And that’s entirely appropriate, because, as Olivier and Dent have shaped the story, Hamlet is revealed, more clearly than ever, as a bold meditation on morality. Yes, they’ve reduced the play—but reduced it to its largest, most mysterious, and most intractable theme. Olivier’s performance, which at first appears unnaturally constrained and recessive, picks up speed as the narrative rushes to its tragic climax, as if the character were being driven by a helpless, perverse attraction to death itself. Olivier conveys the terrifying force of an intelligent man’s desire to reach “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” And in this picture the melancholy prince’s thrusting, aggressive wit and his feverishly exuberant swordplay in the fatal last-act duel with Laertes have an unsettling erotic charge; when Olivier’s Hamlet expires, limp and spent, we feel just how devoutly this consummation was wished for.

Filmcritic.com writes:

This Hamlet, a Best Picture winner, unfortunately stands as one of the stagier productions of the famous play. Gone are (among other scenes) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; in their stead we get more of Laurence Olivier, who also directed, as the put-upon prince of Denmark. Olivier chews scenery with the best of them, playing the tights-clad Hamlet as a sort of prissy boy who'd probably rather be eating grapes. Olivier's direction is problematic, too, jerky and obvious, drawing your attention to the constant camera pans and away from the action. Still, a solid rendition if the classic play, though not really deserving of its platitudes. (At least, not any more.)

CAST

John Laurie ... Francisco
Esmond Knight ... Bernardo
Anthony Quayle ... Marcellus
Niall MacGinnis ... Sea Captain
Harcourt Williams ... First Player
Patrick Troughton ... Player King
Tony Tarver ... Player Queen
Peter Cushing ... Osric, Servant to the Court
Stanley Holloway ... Gravedigger
Russell Thorndike ... Priest
Basil Sydney ... Claudius, The King
Eileen Herlie ... Gertrude, The Queen
Laurence Olivier ... Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Norman Wooland ... Horatio, Hamlet's friend
Felix Aylmer ... Polonius, Lord Chamberlain

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