Every Richard Linklater Film Ranked: Conversation as Cinema

Richard Linklater has spent more than three decades proving that two people talking can carry as much cinematic weight as a car chase, a murder mystery or the end of the world. With Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague adding fresh chapters to his career in 2025, ranking his films means looking at one of American cinema’s strangest achievements: a body of work where time passes, people ramble, and somehow you can’t look away.

22. Bad News Bears (2005)

Linklater taking on a remake of the 1976 baseball comedy made sense on paper. Billy Bob Thornton had the right disreputable energy for Morris Buttermaker, and Linklater had already shown with School of Rock that he could direct kids without turning them into adorable props.

But Bad News Bears never quite finds its own reason to exist. It’s rude, loose and occasionally funny, yet you’re more likely to remember Thornton’s performance than anything Linklater brings to the material.

21. Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019)

Cate Blanchett plays Bernadette Fox, an architect who’s slowly disappearing from her own life before she literally disappears from Seattle. The film, adapted from Maria Semple’s 2012 novel, has a premise built for Linklater’s interest in frustrated people trying to work out who they’ve become.

The problem is tone. Blanchett commits, but the film keeps bouncing between satire, family drama and whimsical adventure without settling into the relaxed confidence of Linklater at his best.

20. The Newton Boys (1998)

A Richard Linklater bank-robbery movie starring Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Skeet Ulrich and Vincent D’Onofrio should be irresistible. Instead, this 1920s-set crime story feels oddly polite.

There’s pleasure in watching that cast bounce off each other, and the film looks great. But compared with Linklater’s movies about people sitting around doing almost nothing, his movie about actual outlaws somehow feels less alive.

19. Fast Food Nation (2006)

Based on Eric Schlosser’s nonfiction bestseller, Fast Food Nation turns an investigation of the American meat industry into an ensemble drama. Greg Kinnear, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke and Kris Kristofferson all pass through a story designed to expose what sits behind the drive-thru counter.

Its anger is understandable, and some images stick. As drama, though, it often feels like an argument wearing character costumes.

18. Me and Orson Welles (2008)

Christian McKay’s performance as Orson Welles is the reason to watch this one. Set around Welles’ famous 1937 production of Julius Caesar, the film follows a teenage actor, played by Zac Efron, who gets pulled into the Mercury Theatre orbit.

Linklater clearly loves backstage personalities and artistic egos. The movie is charming, but you can feel the more interesting film whenever McKay enters the room.

17. Last Flag Flying (2017)

Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston and Laurence Fishburne play Vietnam veterans reunited for a painful trip connected to the Iraq War. That setup gives Linklater exactly what he likes: three people, lots of road, plenty of time to talk.

The conversations are sharpest when the movie stops trying to announce what they mean. Carell’s quiet performance keeps it grounded.

16. SubUrbia (1996)

A group of young adults spend a night hanging around outside a convenience store, complaining about their town, their futures and each other. Yes, that sounds extremely Linklater.

Adapted from Eric Bogosian’s play, SubUrbia is angrier than Slacker and more claustrophobic than Dazed and Confused. It’s deliberately abrasive, which makes it harder to love but difficult to dismiss.

15. Tape (2001)

Three actors. One motel room. About 86 minutes.

Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard and Uma Thurman spend nearly the entire film talking through an ugly event from their shared past. Shot on digital video, Tape looks rough even by early-2000s standards, but the visual ugliness becomes part of its pressure-cooker atmosphere.

14. A Scanner Darkly (2006)

Philip K. Dick plus Linklater sounds like an odd pairing until you remember both are obsessed with identity, paranoia and people who can’t fully explain what’s happening to them.

Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson were filmed in live action before the footage was transformed with rotoscope animation. The effect remains eerie. The film itself is messy, funny and sad in exactly the right proportions.

13. Waking Life (2001)

If A Scanner Darkly uses animation to destabilise reality, Waking Life uses it to make an entire philosophy seminar float.

The movie moves through conversations about dreams, free will, consciousness and existence, with familiar Linklater faces including Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy appearing along the way. Some stretches will lose you. Others might stay in your head for years.

12. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (2022)

Linklater turns his own Houston childhood into a dreamy alternate history where an ordinary kid secretly gets recruited by NASA for a Moon mission.

Released on Netflix in 2022, Apollo 10½ mixes rotoscoped animation with memories of television, playgrounds, family life and the Apollo era. The fake astronaut adventure is fun. The real subject is memory, especially how childhood turns everyday details into mythology.

11. Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

Often described as a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused, this 2016 comedy follows college baseball players during the weekend before classes begin in 1980.

Almost nothing happens. That’s the pleasure. Glen Powell is hilarious, the soundtrack jumps from disco to punk to country, and Linklater lets competitiveness, insecurity and friendship emerge from guys simply hanging out.

10. Hit Man (2023)

Glen Powell co-wrote and stars as Gary Johnson, a mild-mannered professor who works with police by pretending to be a contract killer. Then he meets Madison, played by Adria Arjona, and the performance starts swallowing the performer.

Hit Man is one of Linklater’s slickest entertainments, but its central idea is pure Linklater: how much of your personality is something you’ve chosen to perform?

9. Bernie (2011)

Jack Black gives one of his best performances as Bernie Tiede, a beloved Texas mortician who becomes involved with wealthy widow Marjorie Nugent, played by Shirley MacLaine.

The 2011 film blends scripted scenes with interviews from real townspeople, turning a murder story into something stranger and funnier. Linklater understands Texas affectionately enough to make the jokes sting.

8. Blue Moon (2025)

Linklater’s reunion with Ethan Hawke puts conversation back at centre stage. Hawke plays lyricist Lorenz Hart during the opening night of Oklahoma! in 1943, with much of the film unfolding around a single evening.

It’s exactly the kind of confined setup Linklater thrives on. Give him a room, a complicated person and enough time to talk, and walls start feeling optional.

7. Nouvelle Vague (2025)

Linklater making a film about Jean-Luc Godard making Breathless could easily have become film-school cosplay. Instead, Nouvelle Vague makes the act of creating a movie feel playful, argumentative and alive.

The French New Wave connection fits him. Godard challenged what movies were supposed to look like; Linklater has spent his career challenging what they’re supposed to be about.

6. Slacker (1990)

The movie that announced Linklater’s entire philosophy barely has a conventional plot. The camera drifts through Austin, moving from one eccentric person to another as conversations begin, wander and disappear.

Made on a tiny budget and released nationally in 1991 after its 1990 premiere, Slacker helped give a generation its name. More importantly, it showed Linklater that digression could be structure.

5. Before Midnight (2013)

Jesse and Céline are older now, which means the fantasy has consequences.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy return nine years after Before Sunset, with their characters now raising a family and spending time in Greece. The long hotel-room argument is brutal because neither person is completely wrong. Linklater’s romantic trilogy ends by asking a tougher question than whether love can last: what does lasting actually require?

4. Dazed and Confused (1993)

Set on the last day of school in 1976, Dazed and Confused follows teenagers through hazing rituals, cruising, parties and conversations that feel pointless until you realise they’re defining an entire social world.

It also gave early showcases to Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey and Adam Goldberg. McConaughey’s Wooderson became iconic, but the film works because Linklater never mistakes the coolest guy in the room for the centre of the universe.

3. School of Rock (2003)

The broad studio comedy shouldn’t fit this high. It does.

Jack Black plays Dewey Finn, a failed musician who impersonates a substitute teacher and turns his class into a rock band. Released in 2003, School of Rock earned more than $130 million worldwide, approximately, and became one of Linklater’s biggest mainstream successes.

But the reason it lasts is simple. Dewey actually listens to the kids. Linklater’s great subject has always been people discovering who they might become, and he smuggled that idea into a crowd-pleasing comedy about Led Zeppelin.

2. Before Sunset (2004)

Nine years after Before Sunrise, Jesse and Céline meet again in Paris. He has a flight to catch. They start walking.

The film runs for roughly 80 minutes and unfolds almost in real time, turning casual conversation into emotional suspense. Every joke and pause carries the weight of what happened in Vienna, what didn’t happen afterward, and what both characters are afraid to admit now.

Then comes that ending. “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane.” Jesse smiles. “I know.”

Perfect.

1. Boyhood (2014)

Linklater filmed Boyhood across 12 years, from 2002 to 2013, allowing Ellar Coltrane to grow from a child into a young adult on camera. Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke and Lorelei Linklater age alongside him.

The production method gets the headlines, but the film’s real trick is refusing to manufacture huge turning points. Childhood ends through haircuts, car rides, dinners, breakups and conversations you don’t realise are important until they’re over.

That makes Boyhood the clearest expression of Linklater’s cinema. Time is the special effect. People talking is the action.

Why You Should Care

You don’t need to love slow movies or know anything about independent cinema to get Linklater. Start with School of Rock if you want laughs, Dazed and Confused if you want a hangout movie, or Before Sunset if you want to see how much tension two people walking through Paris can generate.

His best films make ordinary time feel worth noticing. And once you tune into that frequency, a conversation at a kitchen table can feel as consequential as anything Hollywood can blow up.

What to Watch Next

Start with Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) if Linklater’s talk-heavy side is what grabbed you. Its collection of conversations turns awkward pauses and tiny social rituals into the whole point.

Then try Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012) for another funny, restless portrait of adulthood built from friendships and ordinary disappointments. And if Boyhood left you thinking about time, watch Michael Apted’s Up documentary series, which returned to the same group of British participants roughly every seven years across decades.

Linklater’s movies rarely ask you to watch someone save the world. They ask you to notice the afternoon before everything changed.