It’s a film that staggers the imagination as much today as it did four decades ago and it’s not difficult to understand why.

| Mar 20, 2025

Obviously the exploding head is iconic, but the rest of the film is nearly as messy. An on-the-fly script and paper thing characters hint at more intriguing ideas than what is actually seen on screen.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 21, 2023

Cronenberg does deliver the goods; it's an efficient, intelligent sf thriller with the usual surplus of paranoid ideas.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 1, 2022

…an unnerving and challenging work of nihilistic prescience…

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 17, 2022

Not destined to be a classic, nor even the best Cronenberg so far, Scanners is nonetheless an entertaining and often exciting horror-thriller.

| Jul 26, 2022

The picture is a genre classic, a masterpiece in its own spooky way, but saying that evokes visions of elitist projects that delicately scrutinize the human condition. Scanners is not like that all. It is a hard-edge, no-nonsense science fiction thriller.

| Jun 17, 2022

Cronenberg continues to work on our nerves with his special effects, but in the manner of a sadistic dentist drilling away at our teeth. What he does is effectively excruciating, but not the least enjoyable. It's a banal expedition into stupid slaughter.

| Jun 16, 2022

For young moviegoers... Scanners offers the preferred mixture of fright, mystery and silly science. One can only wonder, though, when audiences will stop patronizing gory movies simply because they "take them someplace they have never been before."

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 16, 2022

I like the thought of it I just didn't like the execution... I am a fan of David Cronenberg don't get me wrong but this is probably the film I like the least of his.

| Original Score: 4/10 | Oct 14, 2020

The pacing is so slow and drawn out that even the scenes with stunts and chills seem to drag.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Sep 7, 2020

Scanners digs into ideas of private companies weaponizing everything they can get their hands on, less than ethical business practices of big pharmaceutical companies, and the kind of psychological tests by both sides during the height of the Cold War.

| Original Score: A | Jul 7, 2020

What could have been a dandy super-thriller instead becomes a mediocre display of gruesome special effects in Scanners.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 27, 2020

David Cronenberg's film is original, but it embraces the horror genre in a gratuitous and simple way. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Aug 16, 2019

Scanners, according to David Cronenberg's new film, are people who can control others with their thoughts...The idea has a certain cachet. But Scanners doesn't pay off on it.

| Apr 28, 2018

Cronenberg's deadpan techno-thriller lampoon

| Aug 13, 2015

an intriguing and (by Cronenberg's standards, at least) fun movie

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 20, 2014

Cronenberg is so great at juxtaposing the surreal with the mundane to generate both creeps and (nervous) laughter.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Aug 3, 2014

The generous selection of bonus features includes vintage elements, like a trailer made up almost entirely of the exploding-head scene, a handful of radio spots, and a 1981 talk-show appearance in which Cronenberg discusses his work up to that point.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 14, 2014

Scanners consolidates the ruling problematic of the Cronenberg project from the sex slugs of Shivers to the financial abstractions of Cosmopolis: what are the effects of signals on an organism?

| Jul 7, 2014

Scanners, for the most part, is unable to distinguish itself from other similarly-themed horror thrillers...

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 22, 2014