A Scanner Darkly

The war on drugs has been lost, and when a reluctant undercover cop is ordered to spy on those he is closest to, the toll that the mission takes on his sanity is too great to comprehend in director Richard Linklater's rotoscoped take on Philip K. Dick's classic novel. With stratospheric concern over ...more

Richard Linklater's decision to film his adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly in an animated style similar to his earlier film Waking Life exemplifies everything good about him as a filmmaker. By forcing viewers to constantly assess what and who they are looking at, Linklater is able to underscore the paranoid and Big Brother surveillance aspects of the story -- elements further enhanced when one recalls this film hit theaters around the time that surveillance tactics were a hotly ...more