Richard Linklater

Linklater’s ‘Everybody Wants Some!!’ is a modest film that aspires to be nothing more than an unabashed celebration of youthful exuberance.

Austin, Texas – November 17, 2015 – The South by Southwest® (SXSW®) Film Conference and Festival announced the world premiere of Everybody Wants Some as its Opening Night film for the 23rd edition of SXSW Film on March 11, 2016 in Austin, Texas. Set in the world of 1980s college life, Everybody Wants Some is …

New Projects is a weekly round up of movies and TV shows recently announced and currently in development for the near future.  To be honest, I was a little skeptical of the news last week that Neill Blomkamp would be helming an Alien remake. Elysium was a bust, the jury is still out on Chappie, …

Just when it seemed like Boyhood’s Richard Linklater was done with the film that took twelve years to shoot, he’s recently announced the possibility that Boyhood may get an unlikely sequel. While the first film followed the story of a boy growing up into a young adult, Linklater has admitted that the story of this man’s foyer into adulthood during his 20’s could be an equally compelling project for the director.

Most filmgoers don’t know Richard Linklater’s name but his effect has been felt through the American independent film scene since the debut of Slacker in 1991. For the star-studded cast of commenters sitting down for some insights into Linklater, it’s hard to imagine a world without him. He is the unicorn who managed to build an entire career of passion projects that most filmmakers never get to, or let toil in production hell.

What do film directors Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Agnès Varda, Robert Wise, Fred Zinnemann, Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Roman Polanski, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, Louis Malle, Richard Linklater, Tom Tykwer, Alexander Sokurov, Paul Greengrass, Song Il-Gon, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro Iñárritu have in common? More specifically, what type of film have they directed, setting them …

Richard Linklater is at the height of his power coming off this year’s Boyhood, and yet what’s funny is that he hardly exudes the presence of an auteur the way so many of his contemporaries or his idols have before him. “This Slacker ain’t no slacker”, as Matthew McConaughey says in a trailer for a …

Does Netflix have Eric Cartman’s AWESOME-O working in their studios? You remember; he was the lovable robot who could invent Adam Sandler movies out of thin air, like “Adam Sandler falls in love with a Golden Retriever” or “Adam Sandler is stranded on an island and falls in love with a coconut.” If so, that …

In this new golden age of television that we are currently living in, the television industry is poaching some of cinema’s greatest minds more than ever to create their own long form stories after being restricted to the hour and a half to maximum four hours that film allows. The gap is getting increasingly small …

Richard Linklater, one of his generation’s best and most influential filmmakers, has chosen That’s What I’m Talking About as his next project. As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, it looks like Linklater has chosen his next project after the highly successful Boyhood. Since 2011 the director has been attached to direct a remake of the …

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is an interesting exercise in whether or not artistic intent truly matters. The film is the story of a boy, his sister and his parents as they grow and meander through life over the course of twelve years. To watch it is to experience life unfolding before your eyes, while feeling the keen sensation that virtually nothing is happening.

Over the course of reviewing hundreds of movies a year, a critic over-hypes at least one movie; it happens more times than one would like, but it happens. The main culprit is often red-carpet festival premieres that lead to a dizzying high that positively impacts a film’s reception. A plethora of four star reviews that …

When a filmmaker perfectly aligns the technical and the artistic, we’re reminded of the transformative power of cinema. Lost amid the genre clichés and computer-generated extravaganzas lies an expansive battlefield called ‘the human condition’, where moments of great power co-mingle with insignificant monotony to shape our lives.

Boyhood Written and directed by Richard Linklater USA, 2014 During the discussion preceding the screening of his latest film, Boyhood, director Richard Linklater, recipient of this year’s Founder’s Directing Award, claimed that the concept of exploring a parent-child relationship in real time was one of the two great cinematic ideas he’s had in his almost …

Two bodies, first in sexual motion, then in a dark stillness accompanied by conversations of previous grief and existential dread. It’s a subject explored before by Éric Rohmer and in a much lighter sense with Linklater’s “Before” trilogy. It’s a certain style of romantic trope in cinema history to focus heavily on interesting protagonists as they attempt to connect with each other, revealed who they are with brevity, jokes, and noxious nostalgia. Nuit #1, the first feature of Québécois Anne Émond, aspires to this lineage, taking us from a glitzy, sweaty club nightlife to a dingy, starving-artist-approved apartment for real-time, blunt sex until the title card announces the time for the sometimes illuminating, yet always sophomoric dialogue.

We are now officially half way through the year and so I’ve asked our staff to vote for their favourite films released thus far. Hollywood blockbusters may have disappointed us, but thankfully we can always rely on independent filmmakers to create some truly inspiring films. Rounding out the special mentions is Terrence Malick’s To The …

Self-taught writer-director Richard Linklater was among the most successful talents to emerge from the new wave of independent American filmmakers in the 1990s. Typically setting each of his movies during one 24-hour time period – and with non-formulaic narratives about seemingly random occurrences – Linklater’s work explored what he dubbed “the youth rebellion continuum.” In …

Slacker Directed by Richard Linklater Written by Richard Linklater 1991, USA In 1990, Slacker put Richard Linklater and Austin Texas in the spotlight. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “Slacker is a movie with an appeal almost impossible to describe, although the method of the director, Richard Linklater, is …

The rain, and later cold, didn’t deter audiences as big numbers turned out for day two of Ebertfest. As evidenced by the pairing of “I Remember” with Days of Heaven, Roger put tremendous thought into his programming of the festival, something clearly on display with his choices for day two. The power and beauty of …

The sun is beginning to set on a breezy Austin afternoon. It feels like any other day, but as one makes their way south of downtown, they will feel a slight buzz of anticipation. The first signs are the parking meters all wrapped tight in cellophane. Then the trees. Then the columns. Draping them are …

One narrative mechanism that offers the potential for the audience to feel truly transported into another world, familiar or unfamiliar as it may be, is having someone in the story to represent our perspective. This is an old trick of fiction: insert a Nick Carraway-type person for other characters to confide in, and through these …

Things I Don’t Understand Written by David Spaltro Directed by David Spaltro USA, 2012 Of the many unanswerable metaphysical questions that surround life, the most confounding, ironically, are those that concern death. Humanity’s pathological and evolutionary imperative to survive has driven us to try and rationalize our collective eventualities, in hopes to both understand and …

Bernie Written by Skip Hollandsworth and Richard Linklater Directed by Richard Linklater USA, 2012 Bernie’s a really nice guy. I mean really nice. There are a lot of people in Carthage, Texas that still think so, even though he just shot an old woman in the back four times. Bernie (Jack Black, in a performance …