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

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

Like Tod Browning, Cronenberg doesn't have the stylistic resources to match the forcefulness of his ideas, but his movies remain in the mind for the pull of their private obsessions.

| Jun 5, 2007

All this should give fans of David Cronenberg's previous pix their money's worth, although lack of any rooting interest vitiates any possible suspense and highly elegant visual style works against much shock value.

| Jun 5, 2007

Part conspiracy thriller, part political tract, it is Cronenberg's most coherent movie to date, drawing a dark (but bland) world in which corporate executives engineer human conception to produce ever more powerful mental samurai.

| Jun 24, 2006

Scanners is so lockstep that we are basically reduced to watching the special effects, which are good but curiously abstract, because we don't much care about the people they're happening around.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 23, 2004

The quality of the film's inventiveness is not always of the first order, which is too bad because Mr. Cronenberg does seem to be a director-writer of some style.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 30, 2004

This relatively early work from Cronenberg shows all his signature stylistics in full bloom.

| Mar 10, 2003