Brian Eggert Deep Focus Review Mar 21, 2022 4/4

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

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Taylor Baker Drink in the Movies Sep 14, 2021 86/100

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

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David Walsh World Socialist Web Site Feb 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.

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Mike Massie Gone With The Twins Nov 21, 2020 7/10

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

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Kathi Maio The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Feb 28, 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...

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Justin Harrison The Spool Jan 20, 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.

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Gary Shannon The Young Folks Jan 7, 2019 7/10

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.

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Dorothy Woodend The Tyee (British Columbia) Aug 23, 2017

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?

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Nick Pinkerton Stop Smiling Mar 5, 2014

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.

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Kevin Carr 7M Pictures Jan 19, 2014 2/5

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

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Jeff Meyers Metro Times (Detroit, MI) Apr 20, 2011 B+

...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.

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Joshua Starnes ComingSoon.net Mar 30, 2011 10/10

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.

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Nick Rogers Midwest Film Journal Sep 19, 2010 4/4

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.

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Thomas Caldwell Cinema Autopsy Jul 6, 2010 3/5

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

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Neil Miller Film School Rejects Jul 6, 2010 A

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.

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Fernando F. Croce CinePassion Aug 30, 2009

Ponders the inherent doom of Slacker transgressors

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Felix Vasquez Jr. Cinema Crazed Apr 29, 2009 2/4

Such a brutally gut wrenching disappointment...

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Peter Keough Boston Phoenix Apr 23, 2009 3/4

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.

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Brian Marder Hollywood.com Nov 20, 2008 3/5

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

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Bob Mondello NPR.org Oct 18, 2008

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

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