TSPDT

Key Production Country: USA
Key Genres: Comedy Drama, Comedy, Ensemble Film, Coming-of-Age, Drama, Romance, Animation, Period Film, Sports Comedy, Crime
Key Collaborators: Sandra Adair (Editor), Ethan Hawke (Leading Actor/Screenwriter), Anne Walker-McBay (Producer), Lee Daniel (Cinematographer), Bruce Curtis (Production Designer), Shane F. Kelly (Cinematographer), Graham Reynolds (Composer), Julie Delpy (Leading Character Actress/Screenwriter), Ginger Sledge (Producer), Matthew McConaughey (Leading Character Actor), Steven Chester Prince (Character Actor), Jack Black (Leading Actor)

"In Linklater’s films, words are action. They express personality, identity, conflict, attraction, rejection, sympathy, alienation, affection, evasion, disclosure, and concealment. Mostly, they represent attempts to make sense of the world, to understand people and places and events, and an individual’s relationship to all of those things. Many of the riffs are funny, some are disturbing and some are just nuts—Linklater shows an uncondescending interest in the things that genuinely crazy people say, the possible insights they enfold and the range of discomforts they provoke." - Jesse Fox Mayshark (Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film, 2007)

"Inventive director known for pointed yet playful explorations of the post-postwar generation. After dropping out of college, he worked on an oil rig and parked cars before filming Slackers, a documentary-style look at the students, ex-students, and hangers-on in the college town of Austin where he grew up." - The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994

"Texas-born director whose grinding studies of modern youth angst have won him something of a cult following... It will be interesting to see, as seems likely, Linklater's nihilism clash with mainstream American cinema." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999)

"Linklater is up there with the best directors of his era. His filmography is as original and diverse as they come. The authentic feel of his films derives from the fact that Linklater has a poet's ear for the way people communicate with each other, and his camera never feels intrusive. Even in his most commercial films, you get fully fleshed characters with an abundance of humanism. His obsession with the passing of time, its poetic nature and how it can change people, is another hallmark of his auteur style. His very best efforts are slice-of-life ruminations, avoiding forced drama and instead opting for the beauty of moments. There’s a certain timelessness to Linklater’s cinema, many of his films don’t seem to have aged." - Jordan Ruimy (World of Reel, 2024)

"Richard Linklater's films constitute an intelligent reconfiguration of the 'youth movie' for a generation torn between self-conscious cultural savvy and the time-honoured desire to connect... Linklater homes in on a uniformly garrulous generation's fumbling stabs at communication under the weight of solipsism and endless theorising, the loose-looking sprawl of his films belied by their emotional acuity and seemingly effortless narrative economy." - Kevin Harley (Contemporary North American Film Directors, 2002)

"Self-taught writer/director Richard Linklater was among the first and most successful talents to emerge during the American independent film renaissance of the 1990s. Typically setting each of his movies during one 24-hour period, Linklater's work explored what he dubbed "the youth rebellion continuum," focusing in fine detail on generational rites and mores with rare compassion and understanding while definitively capturing the twenty-something culture of his era through a series of nuanced, illuminating ensemble pieces which introduced any number of talented young actors into the Hollywood firmament." - Jason Ankeny (Allmovie)

"Following his emergence into the spotlight with Slacker (1990), writer-director Richard Linklater was cited by many filmmakers and critics as having helped usher in the independent film movement of the 1990s. Without his manifesto for Generation X - who later were tagged with the sobriquet "slackers" - other independent filmmakers might not have been compelled to make their own movies, including Kevin Smith, who cited Linklater's movie as the key inspiration for making Clerks (1994)." - Turner Classic Movies

"It was Before Sunrise (1995), a film that depicted a full day in the life of two would-be lovers who meet on a train that best revealed Linklater's almost literary aspirations, his scripts always full of heady philosophical discussions that are sometimes at odds with their deceptively breezy delivery." - Joshua Klein (501 Movie Directors, 2007)

"I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy." - Richard Linklater