It is today considered to be one of the greatest samurai films ever made.

It is one of IMDB's Top 50 greatest rated films of all time and on Rotten Tomatoes it has received a critics review of 100%.

Critical reviews of the film praise it for its story, direction, cinematography and its lead performance from Tatsuya Nakadai.

It is considered to be the director's (Masaki Kobayashi) greatest film as well as one of the top five greatest Japanese films of all time, according to Kobayashi's mentor Keisuke Kinoshita.

Roger Ebert reviewed the film as one of his "Great Movies", concluding in a 2012 review that "Samurai films, like westerns, need not be familiar genre stories. They can expand to contain stories of ethical challenges and human tragedy. Harakiri, one of the best of them, is about an older wandering samurai who takes his time to create an unanswerable dilemma for the elder of a powerful clan. By playing strictly within the rules of Bushido Code which governs the conduct of all samurai, he lures the powerful leader into a situation where sheer naked logic leaves him humiliated before his retainers."