Kicking off what ultimately became a trilogy (at least so far), Linklater's 1995 drama was his third straight film to unfold over just a single day. But while his first two films were ensemble pieces, Sunrise narrows its focus to just two characters: Ethan Hawke's Jesse and Julie Delpy's Céline, who meet while vacationing in Vienna and spend a night together exploring the city and talking.
“It's a lovely and wistful celebration of youth, time and moments of connection -- and about the experience of living in the midst of a simple, perfect day that you know you'll remember for the rest of your life.†â€"Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
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Adapting the popular 2012 novel of the same name by Maria Semple, Linklater's most recent film stars Cate Blanchett as the titular Bernadette, a Seattle architect who mysteriously vanishes just prior to a family vacation. It falls to her precocious teenage daughter Bee (Emma Nelson) to investigate. Billy Crudup, Kristen Wiig, James Urbaniak, Judy Greer, and Laurence Fishburne also star in the dramedy, which is Linklater's first outright dud in his storied career.
"It's the kind of adaptation that is so misjudged that you end up struggling to see why anyone thought it a good idea to adapt in the first place." —Benjamin Lee, The Guardian
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Released in 1998, Richard Linklater's only film without a green Metascore tells the true story of a family of Texas bank robbers in the 1920s. The film stars Linklater regulars Matthew McConaughey (who actually comes from the same small Texas town as the Newtons) and Ethan Hawke, plus Skeet Ulrich and Vincent D'Onofrio. Critics found it too conventional and familiar—labels that don't often get attached to a Linklater film.
"You have seen this movie before, every morsel of it." —Laura Miller, Salon
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The first film that Linklater directed without also writing at least part of the screenplay (and there would only be four more in his career), this 1996 dramedy adapts Eric Bogosian's stage play of the same name centering on a group of aimless young people (a Linklater specialty in the 1990s) who spend most of their time gathering outside of a local convenience store (with the play's suburban Boston traded for Linklater's usual Austin, disguised here as "Burnfield"). Nicky Katt and Parker Posey return from Linklater's Dazed and Confused, while Steve Zahn and Samia Shoaib were veterans of the stage production. While it's not one of the director's best films, it does feature a terrific indie rock soundtrack that includes music from Sonic Youth, Superchunk, The Flaming Lips, Beck, and Stephen Malkmus.
"What's weird about subUrbia is that Linklater's zoned-out technique is wedded to Bogosian's in-your-face power-rant oratory. The result is like local anesthesia--you can see the incisions, but you can't feel them." —Peter Rainer, Dallas Observer
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Reading Eric Schlosser's 2001 exposé of the fast food and meat processing industries, your first thought wouldn't necessarily be, "Let's turn it into a narrative feature film!" But you are not Richard Linklater, and he did just that, opting to use a variety of mostly unrelated stories to address many of the themes present in Schlosser's book. The result is only partially successful, according to critics, who seem to think that a documentary would have served the material better.
"Fast Food Nation would have benefited from a longer running time -- the movie often feels like it's missing big chunks of plot -- but Linklater's cautionary message gets through." —Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald
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Linklater's 2005 remake of Michael Ritchie's classic kids' baseball comedy from 1976 casts Billy Bob Thornton in the role of the drunk team coach originally played by Walter Matthau. It's one of two baseball-themed movies from the director, who played the sport in college.
"While Linklater's version has its own unique pacing, mounting up more like a series of innings than a series of acts (even if you think you know how it ends, that bottom-of-the-ninth screwball still beans you silly), it lacks the screwball-to-the-noggin punch of the original." —Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle
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Linklater rarely makes sequels (with one notable exception, which we'll get to), but this one is truly a rarity in his filmography: the original film wasn't even his. Technically, though, it's an adaptation of Darryl Ponicsan's novel of the same name, a sequel to his earlier novel The Last Detail that was made into an excellent 1973 feature film by Hal Ashby. Linklater's film, which finds three Vietnam veterans reuniting when one of their sons dies while serving during the Iraq War, did not receive the same accolades despite an impressive cast led by Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, and Laurence Fishburne.
"Last Flag Flying lacks the casual, lived-in realism you usually find in a Linklater film. You don't buy the men as long-separated pals, and so you don't really buy the premise — the connection that caused Doc to seek out these men is not visible on screen." —Gary Thompson, Philadelphia Daily News
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It's Richard Linklater's first commercially released film, but not his first feature. (Technically, the latter would be It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, a minimalist 1988 film that is included on the Criterion Collection release of Slacker as a bonus.) Still, this portrait of Gen X aimlessness in Austin over a single day served as a calling card for Linklater when it screened at festivals (including Sundance) in 1990 and 1991. And despite (or because of) a mostly non-professional cast and little adherence to film conventions like plot and characters that appear throughout the duration of the film, it won over critics when it opened in theaters later that year, and helped kick off a decade recognized as a high point in the history of indie filmmaking.
“Once you're onto its wavelength (it doesn't take long), Linklater's passing parade starts to ring true.†â€"Mike Clark, USA Today
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The director's second film released in 2001 is an adaptation of Stephen Belber's play of the same name. The three-hander takes place in real time within a motel room, where a reunion between two former high school classmates turns ugly when one accuses the other of raping his ex-girlfriend. Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard, and Uma Thurman star.
"The writing, acting and direction are so convincing that at some point I stopped thinking about the constraints and started thinking about the movie's freedoms." —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
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Not exactly one of Linklater's best-known films, this nevertheless charming 2008 adaptation of Robert Kaplow's period novel follows a young performer (Zac Efron) who is given his big break when Orson Welles (a widely praised Christian McKay) casts him in his groundbreaking 1937 stage production of Julius Caesar. Claire Danes and Ben Chaplin also star.
"Linklater's film adaptation succeeds in bringing the flamboyant Welles to life." —Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer
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Linklater's second experiment in rotoscoped animation is this 2006 adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel of the same name, which takes place in a near-future dystopia marked by rampant drug addiction and high-tech police surveillance. (It's fiction, in case you were wondering.) Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder head the cast.
"It's one of the most faithful movie adaptations of any Dick story to date, and it comes from the scariest of all his books, as well as the truest." —Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
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This 2012 dark comedy reunites Linklater with his School of Rock star Jack Black and his Dazed and Confused lead Matthew McConaughey for a based-on-a-true-story tale of a small-town Texas mortician (Black) who befriends an elderly, ornery, wealthy widow (Shirley MacLaine) and eventually murders her.
"This is writer-director Richard Linklater at his wry, whimsical best, and considering he was the filmmaker behind 1993's 'Dazed and Confused,' that makes the movie something of a milestone." —Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times
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Kicking off what ultimately became a trilogy (at least so far), Linklater's 1995 drama was his third straight film to unfold over just a single day. But while his first two films were ensemble pieces, Sunrise narrows its focus to just two characters: Ethan Hawke's Jesse and Julie Delpy's Céline, who meet while vacationing in Vienna and spend a night together exploring the city and talking.
"It's a lovely and wistful celebration of youth, time and moments of connection -- and about the experience of living in the midst of a simple, perfect day that you know you'll remember for the rest of your life." —Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
13 / 21
A return to form following a rare misfire for the director (Where'd You Go, Bernadette), Linklater's first feature in three years finds him returing to animation for the first time since 2006's A Scanner Darkly and utilizes some of the same rotoscope techniques (along with other animation formats). The semi-autobiographical film is set around the time of the first moon landing in the summer of 1969 as that momentous event is viewed through two very different perspectives: that of the astronauts themselves (along with Mission Control), and another from the viewpoint of a young kid in Houston who is inspired by watching the landing on TV. The best-known names in the ensemble cast include Jack Black and Zachary Levi, and critics praised the film when it debuted at SXSW prior to its Netflix debut in the spring of 2022.
"It's clearly a labor of love, a unique reflection on an unforgettable summer, inviting us to share in a moment of communal spirit which now seems to belong to another world." —David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
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Richard Linklater's much-loved 1993 follow-up to his semi-debut Slacker is another loosely structured ensemble comedy set during a short period of time in Austin, Texas. But Dazed and Confused takes place over one day and night in 1976 rather than the (then-) present day, and uses professional actors. At the time, they weren't exactly household names, but many of them certainly are now, including Matthew McConaughey (in his first major role), Ben Affleck, Milla Jovovich, Adam Goldberg, Parker Posey, Joey Lauren Adams, and Cole Hauser. Among the many other Linklater trademarks established in this film is the terrific soundtrack, here comprised of 1970s classic rock.
"Linklater is a sly and formidable talent, bringing an anthropologist's eye to this spectacularly funny celebration of the rites of stupidity. His shitfaced 'American Graffiti' is the ultimate party movie -- loud, crude, socially irresponsible and totally irresistible." —Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
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Linklater's most commercial—and thus highest-grossing, by a huge margin—film to date, this 2003 comedy (written by Mike White) stars a perfectly cast Jack Black as a rock guitarist who is kicked out of his band and finds himself posing as a substitute teacher at a prep school, where he enlists a group of fifth graders to form a new band. The film's success led to spinoffs for television (on Nickelodeon) and on the stage (in an Andrew Lloyd Webber-penned musical).
"An exuberant, raucous and thoroughly endearing comedy." —Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
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Very well received at its Venice Film Festival debut in the fall of 2023, Linklater's darkly comedic and sexy modern noir stars Glen Powell as a professor who works with the cops by posing as an assassin in order to catch people ordering hits, only to find himself falling for a woman (Adria Arjona) ensnared in his trap. Powell and Linklater teamed to write the script, which is based on a true story. Netflix, which paid a festival-high $20 million to score the rights to Hit Man at Venice, has yet to announce a release date for the film but it will stream (and possibly play in theaters) at some point in 2024.
"A peak-performance engine running wholly on charisma, Richard Linklater's Hit Man revives and revitalizes a genre in awfully short supply." --Ben Croll, The Wrap
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Billed as a spiritual successor (though not an actual sequel) to Dazed and Confused, this 2016 comedy centers on a group of college baseball players in Texas in 1980—a subject that Linklater knows well, since he actually was a college baseball player in Texas in 1980. The ensemble cast includes Blake Jenner, Tyler Hoechlin, Zoey Deutch, and Ryan Guzman.
"Endlessly charming and sneakily wise, Everybody Wants Some!! epitomizes Linklater's unique ability to magnify human behavior with levity." —Eric Kohn, IndieWire
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After a brief slump in the late 1990s, Linklater kicked off the 21st century with a pair of 2001 films, including this unusual animated feature when became the director's best-reviewed film to date upon its release. Originally filmed using live actors and then converted to animation using a rotoscoping process (which Linklater would later use again for A Scanner Darkly), Waking Life is an episodic, dreamlike exploration of reality and existentialism with star Wiley Wiggins joined by an ensemble that includes Linklater regulars like Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, plus Linklater himself and fellow director Steven Soderbergh.
"So verbally dexterous and visually innovative that you can't absorb it unless you have all your wits about you. And even then, you may want to see it again to enjoy its subtle humor and warm humanity." —Stephen Holden, The New York Times
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Linklater's first sequel, this 2004 drama continues the story of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) from Before Sunrise as they reunite nine years later to spend an afternoon together in Paris. Delpy and Hawke co-wrote the screenplay with Linklater, and the three would receive an Oscar nomination for their efforts—marking the first of an eventual five Academy Award nominations for Linklater in his career.
"It's great to see an American filmmaker - and a successful one at that - willing to simply train his cameras on the actors and let them, and their characters, come to life." —Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer
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Linklater's third film featuring the characters of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy), like its 2004 predecessor, resulted in an Academy Award screenplay nomination for the trio. Once again, nine years have passed in the lives of the two characters, who meet up for a summer vacation in Greece. Critics hailed the result as one of 2013's best films.
"A more-than-worthy, expectations-exceeding chapter in one of modern cinema's finest love stories. As honest, convincing, funny, intimate and natural as its predecessors." —Philip Kemp, Total Film
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Richard Linklater's early films all took place over a single day. He went to the opposite extreme for this one-of-a-kind 2014 masterwork, which was filmed over a 13-year period with the same actors, capturing virtually the entire childhood of its main character, Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane). Nominated for six Academy Awards (including Linklater's only best director and best picture nominations, plus best supporting actress for Patricia Arquette, who won the Oscar), Boyhood is the only movie in the 21st century to receive a perfect 100 Metascore (and the first since Red, released 20 years earlier).
"Boyhood is not just a great movie, it's a landmark achievement in film." —Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic