"Ah, the days when Hollywood harbored existentialistic realists, and the entirety of America—from its back roads and highway saloons to its hinterland betting subcultures, working-class desolation, gone-wild farm fields, and small-town cafeterias—was a metaphor for itself, and for all of our postwar lostness. Monte Hellman’s career peak is easily the greatest film I never even heard of as a film-hungry 1970s kid, vanished and hardly ever TV-broadcast, even as I thought the sobering, grown-up likes of Deliverance and Chinatown and Scarecrow were emblematic of an American cinema that had finally reached adulthood. Then came Star Wars."

"Amazingly, Joyce basically tells you how to be a writer here, in one of the most dazzling, lucid, visceral memoirs. The passage where he describes standing in the mouth of a shallow, pebbly river, at sunset, having a revelation about the rest of his life, is scientifically provable to get you as high as a quarter of an MDMA tablet. But the modern reader can't help but note that, as a story of a working class adolescent who thinks he's intellectually superior to everyone around him, is desperate to be a writer, and wanks a lot, Portrait of a Young Artist is also incredibly similar to."

"I love that the Criterion release of this includes all the times this film was talked about on Siskel & Ebert. That show was where I first heard about this film, and seeing how pissed off they were about it being snubbed by the Oscars made me seek it out. It resonated with me so deeply, and still does, the way it presents these two kids and their families, and their struggle to pursue their dreams while dealing with all the practical hardships of working-class life. It’s become kind of a foundational piece of work for me, because it was one of the first films I saw that demonstrated that if you look closely, great stories and great characters are all around us."