"Paul Schrader was always here, he’d never left…"

"Another masterful director [Martin Scorsese]. Paul Schrader was one of the writers on that, another great writer and director. Casting, again; De Niro is amazing"

"What a great Mishima DVD—and the commentary track. Immediately started the movie again and watched it all the way through with Paul Schrader. This has always been one of my favorites of his, along with Blue Collar. And Donald Richie again!"

"The smartest and meanest in the noir cycle, with Ralph Meeker at his sexiest and nastiest as Mike Hammer and a constellation of complicated females, from Maxine Cooper as the hot-to-the-touch Velda to Cloris Leachman and Gaby Rodgers as two dangerously lost women. Praising it for its “thoroughgoing seediness,” Paul Schrader calls it film noir’s masterpiece, and it’s easy to see why."

"This is the third film that I photographed for writer-director Paul Schrader. It is the film he was born to make, even though it is in a language that neither he nor I understood. It is the film of which I am most proud. I had never expected that I would photograph a film that I felt could take a place in the cinematic canon. It opened to some indifferent, even hostile reviews, by critics who had little patience to plumb its depths. This film and Two-Lane Blacktop (a film that was my first assignment as a camera assistant and that was also subject to poor initial reviews) represent two poles of the directorial aesthetic that has informed my own work as cinematographer. Paul Schrader and Monte Hellman, as different as their styles are, represent for me the integrity that American filmmaking can aspire to."

"A great film by Paul Schrader, best known for having penned a bunch of legendary screenplays for Martin Scorsese. The film revolves around Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, and jumps between the story of his life and dreamlike depictions of scenes from his books. It’s got a particularly good score by Philip Glass, who I usually find to be tedious, but this one is nice. Schrader’s use of color and set design during the book segments of the film are quite theatrical and feel closely related to Robert Wilson’s on Einstein on the Beach—although I don’t have any evidence to back that connection up. Great flick, though."