A Scanner Darkly beautifully, and chillingly, considers Dicks persistent theme that our culture has destroyed its own ability to perceive objective reality.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 21, 2022

Episode 34: Relaxer / A Scanner Darkly / The Beach Bum / Holy Motors

| Original Score: 86/100 | Sep 14, 2021

The hostility toward the Bush administration and its police-state ambitions is legitimate and no doubt deeply felt, but it is not particularly well developed.

| Feb 14, 2021

When everything comes together at the end, it's difficult not to be satisfied with the results.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Nov 21, 2020

Suffice it to say that A Scanner Darkly is a very fine film in which the writing, directing, performing, and technical arts all serve their story very well indeed...

| Feb 28, 2020

A Scanner Darkly is the bleakest and saddest of Linklater's films. That it is so recognizably a Richard Linklater film despite that makes it all the more powerful.

| Jan 20, 2020

Using interpolated rotoscoping techniques Linklater manage[s] to capture a unique visual style for "A Scanner Darkly" just absurd enough to be comical and just human enough to be tragic.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 7, 2019

The film is beautiful to look at, rotoscoped with heavy black lines surrounding graphic blocks of colour, but can you draw any conclusions about the content from the style?

| Aug 23, 2017

It is exhausting in its yammering, yes, but the very fact of its putting forth a vision of a future that's scented with bongwater, revolving around the axis of a sloppy living room, is enough to recommend it.

| Mar 5, 2014

I got bored with the random diversions into the long-winded conversations of the drug culture.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 19, 2014

...not for everyone. It's a complicated film that requires patience and, most likely, subsequent viewings to appreciate the jigsaw view of control and paranoia.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 20, 2011

In the end, it offers only the slightest of answers and the slimmest of hopes, because that is often all life offers as well. Whether anyone grasps that hope it leaves open for the audience to determine.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Mar 30, 2011

Trippy rotoscoping is the perfect aqueous aesthetic. Unlike many Philip K. Dick adapters exchanging existentialism for explosions, Richard Linklater focuses on Dick's apprehensions about the trust, joy and freedoms at risk for the sake of progress.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 19, 2010

Not nearly as coherent, cinematic or fulfilling as it should have been.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 6, 2010

The message is clear and the animation creates a world unlike any other in film, making A Scanner Darkly an easy addition to the must-see list of 2006.

| Original Score: A | Jul 6, 2010

Ponders the inherent doom of Slacker transgressors

| Aug 30, 2009

Such a brutally gut wrenching disappointment...

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 29, 2009

Like many of Dick's parallel-mirror scenarios, this one is air-tight and diabolical. More fresh air in the form of Linklater's humor would be welcome.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 23, 2009

A Scanner Darkly is capable of inducing euphoria if viewers focus on one element of splendor--the acting, concept, dialogue or animation--per viewing.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 20, 2008

The coolest thing about the movie version of A Scanner Darkly is how very literally it takes the scanner part of that title.

| Oct 18, 2008