Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

The most unconventional biopic I've ever seen, and one of the best. Read full review

Beautiful, yet flawed film. Read full review

Calling Schrader's masterpiece a mere biopic doesn't do it justice. It's more a dreamy, hypnotic meditation on the tragic intersection of Mishima's oeuvre and existence that takes place as much in its subject's fevered imagination as the outside world. Read full review

Graced with a throbbing orchestral score from Philip Glass and John Bailey’s luminous photography, this is appropriately monumental filmmaking. Read full review

One of the most gorgeous and sophisticated portraits of an artist ever put on film. Read full review

One of the year`s boldest, most successful films, a film full of ideas that challenges us to examine how we conduct our lives, while at the same time dazzling us with extraordinary visuals. Read full review

Can a film that raises more questions about its subject than it answers be considered a masterpiece? If it can, that film is Paul Schrader's innovative cinematic biography of the Japanese novelist, essayist and actor Yukio Mishima, the man who in 1970 committed public seppuku (hara-kiri) in an unprecedented, grandiloquent attempt to turn his life into art. [12 Sep 1985]

A sumptuous austerity, paralleling Mishima’s disciplined decadence. Read full review

An ambitious, respectful account of the life and work of Yukio Mishima, the prolific Japanese author who made a romantic cult of Japan's lost world of martial glory and spartan warrior-manhood. Read full review

A beautiful, deadly serious attempt by Paul and Leonard Schrader to illuminate the life--and death--of one of Japan's most highly visible and self-propelling enigmas. Read full review

Mishima's most stunning aspect is the visual style employed in the dramatizations of the novels. With colorful, theatrical sets by famed Japanese designer Eiko Ishioka, the sequences are quite unique and impressive in their own right, and the entire film is photographed beautifully by John Bailey. Read full review

This handsomely shot movie, with its throbbing Philip Glass score, has a kind of perverse integrity; its mixture of the art house and the hothouse is pure Schrader. I'm not sure whom this movie is made for, but you've got to admire the chutzpah of the man who got it made. [23 Sep 1985, p.68]

There’s a coldness in Schrader’s calculations, and disturbingly he seems to swallow the entire myth of Mishima, an extreme right-wing nutjob who wanted to return Japan to samurai values. Philip Glass’s score, however, still takes the breath away. Read full review

Here is an American film, in Japanese with English subtitles, written, directed and photographed by Americans, made in Japan with a Japanese cast, which attempts to reveal the spiritual mysteries of a quintessentially Japanese phenomenon. That it doesn't succeed is almost a foregone conclusion. What is surprising, however, is that Mishima is as tolerable as it is, given all the strikes against it. Read full review

Mishima tries to make sense of both its subject's life and his work, and ends up illuminating neither. Read full review