Slacker

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Slacker

R

1991

1h 37m

Comedy

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Tomatometer

Popcornmeter

82%

Tomatometer

45 Reviews

77%

Popcornmeter

10,000+ Ratings

Austin, Texas, is an Eden for the young and unambitious, from the enthusiastically eccentric to the dangerously apathetic. Here, the nobly lazy can eschew responsibility in favor of nursing their esoteric obsessions. The locals include a backseat philosopher (Richard Linklater) who passionately expounds on his dream theories to a seemingly comatose cabbie (Rudy Basquez), a young woman who tries to hawk Madonna's Pap test to anyone who will listen and a kindly old anarchist looking for recruits.

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Critics Consensus

Slacker rests its shiftless thumb on the pulse of a generation with fresh filmmaking that captures the tenor of its time while establishing a benchmark for 1990s indie cinema.

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Kim Newman

Empire Magazine

This unconventional film will offend anyone looking for a plot, but Linklater's smart observations speak volumes.

Rated: 4/5

Mar 14, 2021

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Kenneth Turan

Los Angeles Times

When the way characters are described in the credits ("Dostoevsky wanna-be," "Having a breakthrough day") is more involving than the characters themselves, you know you're in for a long evening.

Mar 14, 2021

Full Review

Richard Brody

The New Yorker

The film presents the teeming weirdness of daily life in Austin as a swarm of individual alternatives, each spinning wildly out of control and crashing into one another's active fantasies to unleash vast creative energy.

Mar 30, 2020

Full Review

Farah Cheded

A Good Movie To Watch

For viewers, the radical Slacker generously provides a singular experience, one in which every possible idle curiosity that might occur to us about all the people we see on screen is satisfied.

Rated: 79/100

Aug 12, 2023

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Brett Doze

InSession Film

Slacker is certainly not the only, nor the most influential of low-budget independent filmmaking from the 1990s. But it is a model example of a feature depicting traits that came to define a filmmaker’s career...

Rated: B+

May 2, 2023

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Jeffrey M. Anderson

Common Sense Media

Each new character lasts only a few minutes, but the bigger picture is one of the most memorable movies about young people trying to find themselves.

Rated: 4/5

Mar 14, 2021

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stephen b

Wait until he learned he could go back and animate these scenes.

Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars

09/14/24

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Mason M

Richard Linklater is one of my favorite directors, and he's usually great at the film about nothing, so I was very disappointed by this film. It has a great concept, and I don't usually like to say this, but it was incredibly boring. It's not that funny, I can't latch on to anything in the film, due to it switching characters every time I blink, and it's paced so terribly that it feels like it's 3 hours long. But even then, there are some good parts to this, I liked the opening taxi scene, and I liked the part with the guy trying to get over his girlfriend. But Slacker just feels like a chore to watch.

Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars

09/14/24

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Augustine J

I watched this movie because I absolutely loved Dazed and Confused and wanted to see more Richard Linklater movies. However, Slacker did not sit well with me. I do applaud its creative vignettes, which sometimes got a chuckle out of me, but over all this movie was boring and uninteresting. It took me multiple attempts to finish it and I when I did it just left me with a unsatisfying ending.

Rated 2 out of 5 stars

11/01/23

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Pam H

Defines an entire generation. The most iconic Gen X movie ever made.

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

09/09/23

Full Review

Audience Member

This is the precursor to Dazed and Confused. Set in the dawning of the 90s in Austin,TX , and shot at that exact place and time. Despite being shot in the actual time it was set, the characters are not as well acted(which you can't blame them for much, it was mainly a cast of locals thrown together while the director was in film school). But even the writing is more over the top(or maybe the amount eccentric people in 1990 Austin was just off the charts, who knows). Either way, it's not terrible, but it leads to an experience that just doesn't flow as well as Linklaters later films of the same type. 6.25/10

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

01/31/23

Full Review

steve c

A collection of random conversations ... no plot ... nothing ... wth. I guess the real slackers are the people who wrote this film.

Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars

03/30/23

Full Review

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Synopsis

Austin, Texas, is an Eden for the young and unambitious, from the enthusiastically eccentric to the dangerously apathetic. Here, the nobly lazy can eschew responsibility in favor of nursing their esoteric obsessions. The locals include a backseat philosopher (Richard Linklater) who passionately expounds on his dream theories to a seemingly comatose cabbie (Rudy Basquez), a young woman who tries to hawk Madonna's Pap test to anyone who will listen and a kindly old anarchist looking for recruits.

Director: Richard Linklater
Producer: Richard Linklater
Rating: R
Genre: Comedy
Original Language: English
Release Date (Streaming): Feb 18, 2016
Runtime: 1h 37m
Sound Mix: Surround

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