The 10 Best Richard Linklater Movies, Ranked

The Big Picture

• Hit Man is a refreshing mix of romantic comedy and film noir, showcasing Glen Powell as a leading man.
• Linklater’s most iconic film, Dazed and Confused, captures teen life in 1970s Texas like no other.
• Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly highlight Linklater’s bold experimentation with animation and complex themes.

Loosely based on the true story of police informant posing as a contract killer, Richard Linklater‘s rom-com noir Hit Man premiered to critical acclaim last fall, and has proven to be a runaway success on Netflix. Hit Man is both a return to form, and in some ways a refreshing curveball for the filmmaker, and it announces star and co-writer Glen Powell as a leading man in no uncertain terms.

Houston, Texas native Linklater first made an imprint as the ambitiously experimental filmmaker behind Gen X classics like Slacker, Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise. His is a name that perhaps doesn’t pop up in discussions about the greatest living filmmakers as much as it should; he’s never shied away from technical innovation and risk, and much of his canon is singularly humanistic. These are Richard Linklater’s best films, ranked from remarkable to all-time classic.

10 Waking Life’ (2001)

Starring Wiley Wiggins, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy

Linklater’s strangest film is an essential cut. The vibrantly animated drama follows Wiley Wiggins through Austin, Texas and beyond, where he meets all kinds of characters muse on philosophy, life and interconnectedness. Part of the fun of the fun of it as a viewer is mulling over who’s sharing genuine philosophy and who’s just talking in circles. The animation style, superimposed over real actors, is certainly reminiscent of the living painting style that made Into the Spider-Verse and sequel so memorable years later.

Linklater’s greatest characters, Jessie (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) of the Before films, make a brief appearance. Waking Life is bold experimentation that mostly works like gangbusters, sometimes to transcendent and even spiritual effect. Roger Ebert added the film to his “Great Movies” anthology of the best movies ever made.

9 ‘Slacker’ (1990)

Starring Richard Linklater, Kim Krizan and Mark James

Linklater’s breakthrough feature is his least accessible movie, and also might be his funniest. It also makes considerable strides toward being indescribable: essentially, it’s a day in the life of people in Austin, Texas, from witty and pretentious casual philosophers to snake oil salespeople to insufferable elitists. Something like this would be an unwatchable nightmare in lesser hands, but Linklater’s humorous sense of discovery and ear for the way people actually talk made it an instant hit on the festival circuit and among critics, and ultimately a bona fide cult classic.

The director (who also stars here) would go on to make better, far more polished movies, but Slacker just might be his most influential. Its influence is apparent in everything from the early work of Kevin Smith to The Big Lebowski.

8 ‘A Scanner Darkly’ (2006)

Starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr. and Winona Ryder

In this adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel, Keanu Reeves plays SoCal cop Bob Arctor, who’s tasked with investigating drug dealer Donna (Winona Ryder) in hopes of meeting her supplier. Like all of Dick’s best, A Scanner Darkly explores no shortage of themes, tantalizingly: addiction, paranoia, the utter futility of the war on drugs. The digital cinematography and frame-by-frame painterly rotoscoped animation makes the movie feel appropriately like a drug trip, but it’s important to note this is plot-heavy relative to Linklater’s canon.

Aesthetically and from a narrative standpoint, A Scanner Darkly is a more gripping utilization of this animation style than Waking Life. A Scanner Darkly is an underrated, brilliantly acted science fiction noir that feels something like timeless in its inspired but measured strangeness. Robert Downey Jr.’s supporting performance is perhaps the most striking of the lot: two years before Iron Man made him about as famous and well-paid as any actor in history, A Scanner Darkly is a reminder of the raw chameleonic, often hilarious talent that’s always made him one of the greats.

7 ‘Before Sunrise’ (1995)

Starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy

In the first entry of Linklater’s iconic romantic saga (co-written with Kim Krizan), Jesse and Celine meet on a train ride across Europe, establishing a connection before Jesse convinces Celine to spend a night walking through the moonlit streets of Vienna. Things end with an ambiguous goodbye and scrappy plan to reunite in six months.

One of the best movies of the ’90s, Before Sunset is deeply romantic and pretty much flawless (in fact, it’s one of scarce few films to boast a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, for whatever it’s worth). It’s a testament to the strength of Linklater’s catalog that it’s so low on this ranking. It’s distinctly a Gen X movie in its angst, the fact that it’s more about the search for meaning and connection than much of a plot. It’s an impeccably scripted romantic classic, and this series would get even better once the actors served as co-screenwriters, and the line between reality and fiction blurred to immersive effect.

6 ‘Boyhood’ (2014)

Starring Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette and Ellar Coltrane

Growing up is hard to do, and even harder to make a convincing and realistic movie about. Parenthood inspired Linklater to film an immersive bildungsroman over the course of 12 years, ultimately shaped into a 165-minute drama that absolutely stunned critics in 2014. With hindsight, and once you look past the sheer technical accomplishment of it all, undeniably astounding and worth the gamble, the characters are arguably not quite as memorable as the people who populate some of the director’s most revered, fan-favorite efforts like Dazed and Confused, the Before movies, and even School of Rock. It’s a high bar to clear, to be sure.

A never-better Arquette and Hawke carry the dramatic weight of the entire enterprise, resulting in a well-earned Oscar nod and win, respectively. Boyhood was heavily favored to win Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director through much of awards season, ultimately losing both to Alejándro Gonzalez Iñárritu‘s Birdman.

5 ‘Dazed and Confused’ (1993)

Starring Jason London, Matthew McConaughey and Ben Affleck

Undeniably Linklater’s most iconic and oft-quoted motion picture, 1970s Texas-set period piece Dazed and Confused establishes a time and place like few films can. It also came at a time where teen movies were generally out of fashion. The shaggy comedy about teens being teens on the last day of high school is almost the antithesis of the more high-concept, pointed and plot-reliant teen movies of John Hughes that ruled the ’80s.

The young cast supplied an eclectic list of movie stars who rose to prominence throuhgout the ’90s and aughts alongise star Jason London: Matthew McConaughey in his first film role, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Milla Jovovich and even future double Oscar winner Renée Zellweger as an extra. The very best Richard Linklater pictures are indispensable Americana; Dazed and Confused is such a picture.

4 ‘Hit Man’ (2023)

Starring Glen Powell, Adria Arjona and Retta

Romantic comedy and genuine film noir are two genres that haven’t collided all that much, at least not memorably. Sometimes genre alchemy just really clicks in a surprising way, like in the case of Linklater’s latest film. Hit Man premiered on the festival circuit last fall, and it truly lives up to the critical hype, especially as a star vehicle for Glen Powell, who’s just astonishing throughout. A star is born.

It might seem a little bit extra to place a film so new ahead of a bona fide classic like Dazed on a ranking, but damned if it isn’t a profound pleasure to see Linklater firing on all cylinders following efforts like Everybody Wants Some!!, Last Flag Flying, and Where’d You Go, Bernadette that could have been so much more. The breezy Linklater movie DNA that favors character over plot is here, but it still ranks among his most purely entertaining movies (it’s easy to see why the director’s most accessible effort since School of Rock has played so well on Netflix). It’s by far the sexiest movie he’s ever made, and ranks near Challengers as perhaps the most giddily erotic mainstream movie in memory.

3 ‘School of Rock’ (2003)

Starring Jack Black, Joan Cusack and Mike White

Linklater’s first comedy for a major studio, School of Rock is what happens when comedy greats (the cast includes Jack Black, Joan Cusack, Mike White, Amy Sedaris and Sarah Silverman) operate at peak power thanks to a great comedy director. The box-office hit, about an underachieving guitarist who commandeers a classroom full of grade schoolers in the direction of a local Battle of the Bands, struck a cultural chord and was eventually adapted for Broadway and TV.

No movie has tapped into Jack Black’s star power and comedic chutzpah quite like School of Rock (Linklater obviously found a kindred spirit in slacker with a heart of gold, and perhaps a mind of gold after all), and it’s all the more impressive for being a laugh-out-loud film for kids and families. It’s a joy and a rarity to see a movie this riotously funny that never actually laughs at anyone. Black would reunite with Linklater in 2011 for the underrated Bernie, which narrowly missed this list.

2 ‘Before Midnight’ (2013)

Starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy

Ranking Richard Linklater’s 10 best movies is really, really hard. Not just because heartbreaking omissions must be made (just go watch Bernie) to the overall enterprise, but this also means the Before films must be ranked in something like a worst to best order. How do you rank that which has no flaw? The third picture hopscotches to Greece, where now-married Jesse and Celine (they also have twin daughters) vacation, at least for a bit, before they have to discuss make-or-break matters of family and the future.

The centerpiece of Before Midnight, and it makes up a little under half the film’s runtime, is a fight, in a hotel room. It’s the kind of fight you can only have with someone you’ve known for years: years of resentments, spats, harsh realities and triumphs. It draws blood, equal parts upsetting and just jaw-droppingly well done. This may not be the Before film that fans enchanted by the exhilarating second entry necessarily wanted, but it’s the Before film that was needed, in many ways the most artistically striking of the three. It’s one of multiple flat-out masterpieces in the Linklater canon. 2022 came and went, and it looks like we may never even revisit Jesse and Celine again on the big screen. It’s easy to be sad about that… but is it the worst thing, really? How many movie trilogies out there, like the Before films, are truly perfect from start to finish?

1 ‘Before Sunset’ (2004)

Starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy

Nine years after Before Sunrise, Jesse and Celine reunite, surprisingly enough, in Paris. Celine tracked Jesse down to a small Parisian bookseller, where he’s signing a steamy novel that’s obviously based on that night in Vienna. The pair walk and talk, they even catch a riverboat ride on the Seine, as the clock ticks toward Jesse’s flight back to the states, where he’s unhappily married. Transpiring in breathless real time that makes the film heart-pounding in its way, Before Sunset is a technical masterclass. This is the Empire Strikes Back of love stories: we’re thrilled to see these characters again after a long wait, then we’re barely able to catch our breath before plunging into a new narrative with much higher stakes.

The chief difference here, on top of Linklater just simply being a more confident filmmaker, is the actors’ contributions to the screenplay that would garner an Oscar nomination. We get a lot of time to know Jesse and Celine over the three films as they’re the only principals (Before Sunset is, even more than the other two films, almost entirely a two-hander), and their lives are clearly influenced in part by the lives of the actors (Hawke would divorce Uma Thurman months after Before Sunset hit cinemas). There’s bitter and sweet here, but sweet reigns thanks in no small part to one of the best and most quotable film endings since Casablanca. Before Sunrise is Linklater’s best, an endlessly rewatchable magnum opus.

NEXT: Romantic Movies That Are Perfect From Start to Finish