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Top Critics (38)
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Fresh (127)
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DVD (29)
The coolest thing about the movie version of A Scanner Darkly is how very literally it takes the scanner part of that title.
As A Scanner Darkly proves, Keanu is the Coolness -- passive blankness, leaden line delivery, and all. Let's hear it for the vague blur.
Mr. Linklater emerges once again as the Austin auteur par excellence, even if A Scanner Darkly is set in a ratty precinct of Orange County.
Linklater's willingness to experiment ... is laudable. But I'm not sure he's reinventing animation here, or even adequately serving that older-than-children animation audience.
The first film to capture the author's transience and his art.
Here's a guy willing to take risks, willing to tackle challenging material, willing to assume his audience has a brain. Unfortunately, his audience's collective brain is going to be hurting mightily for the first hour of this film.
...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.
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.
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.
Not nearly as coherent, cinematic or fulfilling as it should have been.
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.
Ponders the inherent doom of Slacker transgressors
Such a brutally gut wrenching disappointment...
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.
A Scanner Darkly is capable of inducing euphoria if viewers focus on one element of splendor--the acting, concept, dialogue or animation--per viewing.
The painted, slightly disorienting look is a good match for the sinister, seriocomic, drug-addled world of the book.
Provocative animated sci-fi. Not for kids.
Too talkie to be legitimately entertaining, too dark to be wholly enjoyable and too muddled to be entirely comprehensible, A Scanner Darkly stands as a creative, if unengaging interpretation of its source materia
Linklater may have admired the novel -- I do, too -- but that doesn't necessarily make him the ideal director for this material.
a trippy movie that doesn't make it easy for the audience to follow. The story is complex and confusing and theanimation keeps the viewer from entering the tale emotionally or intellectually.
Relentlessly interesting to watch if somewhat less than compelling as a film.
this dystopian paranoid thriller tracks addiction in all its highs and lows, and offers a dignified elegy for its misguided casualties.
Menos interesante que Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly es de todos modos un film inusual que vale la pena verse.
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