"Frenzy" received positive reviews from critics. Vincent Canby of "[he New York Times" called it "a passionately entertaining film" with "a marvelously funny script" and a "superb" cast. He put it on his year-end list of the ten best films of 1972. "Variety" also posted a rave review, declaring: "Ingeniously fresh story-telling ideas, stamped with the same mischievous, audacious and often outrageous mixture of humor and suspense that first made him and later sustained him, make the Universal release one of Hitchcock's major achievements." Roger Ebert gave the film his highest grade of four stars, calling it "a return to old forms by the master of suspense, whose newer forms have pleased movie critics but not his public. This is the kind of thriller Hitchcock was making in the 1940s, filled with macabre details, incongruous humor, and the desperation of a man convicted of a crime he didn't commit." Penelope Gilliatt of "The New Yorker" wrote of Hitchcock that "we are nearly back in the days of his great English films", adding "He is lucky to have been able to draw on Anthony Shaffer to do "Frenzy"s sly screenplay, not to speak of a cast of first-rate, well-equated actors pretty much unknown outside England, so that audiences have no preconceptions about who are the stars and therefore unkillable." Kevin Thomas of the "Los Angeles Times" called the film "Alfred Hitchcock's best picture in years, with "all the marks of work by a master at his craft and at his most assured."