Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, released earlier this year in a Criterion special edition DVD, begins a one-week theatrical run today at New York’s Film Forum, in a new 35 mm print, and this dazzling, thoroughly unconventional biopic of the controversial Japanese writer Yukio Mishima is getting everyone talking again. “Schrader’s brilliant, baroque biopic comes close to being the filmmaker’s crowning achievement,” proclaims Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. “It’s fetishistic, lyrical, narcissistic, and, at key moments, borderline berserk. In other words, the movie captures its subject to a tee.” Time Out New York’s David Fear calls the film Schrader’s “most formally disciplined work, its textures made more shimmering by the Philip Glass score. A final, enraptured flourish from the age of the Hollywood auteur.” Schrader himself stopped by WNYC radio’s Leonard Lopate Show to discuss the rerelease (as well as the concurrent theatrical premiere of his new film, Adam Resurrected). Click here to listen to a podcast of that program.
1985
120 min
Color & Black and White
1.85:1
Categories: Press Notes
2 Comments
Wed 17 Dec at 06:39 PM
pablo
i will love to see this film in theaters. i hope it comes to L.A.
Wed 17 Dec at 10:48 PM
david
dear criterion folks,
just came back from film forum (complete with schrader q+a), and i promise that if you release this – one of my very favorite films – on blu-ray, i alone will buy enough copies to make it worth your while.
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