"Per Oscarsson plays a starving young writer - a performance with brilliant, glinting variations on self-mockery and paranoia. Henning Carlsen has transcribed the Knut Hamsun novel to the screen with amazing fidelity. It's an intense and remarkable movie - a classic of the starving-young-artist genre."

- Pauline Kael, "5001 Nights at the Movies"

"Carlsen has made an excellent screen adaptation of Knut Hamsun's famous first novel.  Boasting some wonderfully atmospheric locations and a strong evocation of the squalor of poverty, the film triumphs above all in Oscarsson's complex, truthful portrayal of a man, ravaged by hunger, whose mind is on the verge of disintegration."

 - Bloomsbury Foreign Film Guide by Ronald Bergan and Robyn Karney

"I first encountered the film in Paris.  I was there for a few months as a student.  It was 1967.  I just walked in blindly to the theater.  I didn't really know what this film was.  Someone had said something good about the film, so I went and saw it.  It absolutely turned me inside out.  I thought it was one of the greatest films I had ever seen."

 "There's the tremendous performance by Per Oscarsson.  Tremendous!  One of the greatest performances I've ever seen on the screen.  It's just so brilliantly acted that you're sucked in in ways that are rare in film."

 "This film has my great admiration and, the more I see it, the more I like it."

- Paul Auster

"Writer-director Henning Carlsen and actor Per Oscarsson scrape away everything non-essential from this world-famous Knut Hamsun story.  HUNGER paints a landscape of obsession: the realm of a literally starving artist.  Pontus, the protagonist in this terrifying tale, is possibly a genius and probably a madman, and he’ll waste away before jeopardizing his talent, integrity, or even his soul.  Stunning black-and-white photography, Carlsen’s perfectly focused screenplay and Oscarsson’s scary, heartbreaking performance made this film a worldwide arthouse favorite upon its initial release."

- Buck Henry, Telluride Film Festival program, 2004

"(Per Oscarsson) is extraordinary, ranging from a vertiginous, disgusting, almost verminous decay, with bad, stained teeth, to a completely incandescent, waif-poetic charm."

- Renata Adler, New York Times