- Ingmar Bergman
"One of the greatest movie performances I've ever seen. A performance of electrifying power."
- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"Magnificent and distinguished. It's more than a mercy, it's a coup."
- David Thomson
"Few have dared what Brandauer accomplishes: showing us a good actor responding to the same neurotic drive for the center of the stage, the immortalizing role. His is a great performance, nothing less."
- Richard Schickel, TIME Magazine
"Mephisto is brilliant metaphorical filmmaking."
- Bruce McCabe, Boston Globe
"Possesses an inner momentum and the film as a whole, with its dynamic leading performance, has an energy reminiscent of the films of Andrzej Wajda."
- David Shipman
"A chillingly real experience."
- Joshua A. Guttman, The Knockturnal
"Mephisto excels at depicting the boiling-frog manner in which complacency allows extremism to take hold."
- Jake Cole, Spectrum Culture
"Director István Szabó navigates a swooning historical landscape that threatens to consume his central figure, who turns in one of the great screen performances of all time. Brandauer embodies the tortured artist through a wildly vivid range that careens from hammy, operatic full-body gestures to the most subtle changes of expression at eyeball-level."
- Pat Padua, Washington City Paper