A Scanner Darkly: Critic Reviews

In A Scanner Darkly, we're watching other people freak out, but the film is maddening to sit through because their freak-outs never become ours.

Identities shift and melt like shadows in Richard Linklater's animated adaptation of the 1977 novel by the science fiction visionary Philip K. Dick.

Not a triumph, but a clever rendering of the subversive spirit of Philip K Dick.

A Scanner Darkly is a visually riveting mind-bender inspired by drug-induced experiences.

The characters look as though they have been flattened inside a glass slide, a perfect visual reflection of their political and psychological binds.

This is a movie about losing one's grip and like any addict's story, it's boring, ugly, sad, and terribly human. And surprisingly funny.

This straightforward version of Dick's anguished vision of drug-addled addiction makes Naked Lunch seem positively romantic.

Fans of the late sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick may rejoice at the news that Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly is the most faithful adaptation of one of his stories to reach the screen. Unfortunately, the story is one of Dick's least cinematic.

The first film to capture the author's transience and his art.

Much like someone who doesn't realize how high he is, A Scanner Darkly talks too much and doesn't say enough.

The artiness gets in the way of thrilling plot twists; we're still trying to sort out images when we should be sorting out facts.

It's a pity it doesn't have more oomph, because the book is arguably Dick's masterpiece, and as brain-rattling today as when it came out in 1977.

Watching A Scanner Darkly, we can feel [Philip K.] Dick's world close in on us. And we can be glad we're only visitors.

An ambitious animated adaptation of one of the most personal novels by sci-fi visionary Philip K. Dick.

A very talky and curiously uninvolving film.

One of the most disturbing antidrug public service announcements ever produced.

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.

As Dick's vision matches up with our times, so does director Richard Linklater's animation technique match the story's material. A Scanner Darkly is a joyful wedding of medium and message.

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.

Plot point by plot point, the film seems more concerned with achieving a lucid retelling of the novel's events, resulting in an almost disappointingly well-behaved sci-fi noir that's mildly provocative rather than visionary.

A Scanner Darkly doesn't quite live up to the promise of its opening sequence, but it's still an audacious offering during a season of brain-dead blockbusters.

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.

As fascinating and intelligent as the movie is, A Scanner Darkly leaves you wishing it might have actually been less faithful in word, and more in spirit, to Philip K. Dick's universe of bugged-out paranoid weirdness.

Richard Linklater's squiggly new film, A Scanner Darkly, is an ambitious attempt to find the right visual style to render the experience of drug addiction and the paranoid vision of novelist Philip K. Dick, into a distinctive visual form.

As A Scanner Darkly proves, Keanu is the Coolness -- passive blankness, leaden line delivery, and all. Let's hear it for the vague blur.