Slacker

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Slacker

R

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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

03/14/2021

4/5

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

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Kenneth Turan

Los Angeles Times

03/14/2021

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.

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Richard Brody

The New Yorker

03/30/2020

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.

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Farah Cheded

A Good Movie To Watch

08/12/2023

79/100

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.

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Brett Doze

InSession Film

05/02/2023

B+

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...

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Jeffrey M. Anderson

Common Sense Media

03/14/2021

4/5

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.

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Insomniac X

@RT03001349 03/24/2025

Experimental indie film explores 90's Austin counterculture through a succession of shifting and colliding perspectives. The drop-outs and free spirits in Slacker reject social norms and expectations in favor of their own idiosyncratic fixations -- without the unifying political ideas of 60's counterculture, however, the kids are left all too vulnerable to the dark undercurrent of narcissism, paranoia, and mental illness that runs through the film. The wheels are turning, but we seem to be going nowhere. Slacker is a fascinating and innovative document of the spirit of its times.

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thiago s

@Thiagostone 03/21/2025

Filme fraco, o roteiro é fraco, o filme tem cenas de fracas, a história é fraca, o elenco é mais ou menos e ninguém melhora a porra do filme, os personagens sao ruins, e faltou muitas cenas para o filme ser bom.

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Will G

@Wgoodeve 01/26/2025

This is a great movie! An early film from Richard Linklater. Lots of scenes of Austin, Texas. I did not like it when they broke the typewriter. These teenagers sure are some slackers.

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stephen b

@RT02381805 09/14/2024

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

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Mason M

@RT73597940 09/14/2024

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.

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Augustine J

@RT91683837 11/01/2023

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.

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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
Screenwriter: 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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