Film

Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
 

Scanners (1980)

Director: David Cronenberg

Average user rating
1 review

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

This looks less like Cronenberg's popular mid-'70s exploiters (Rabid, Shivers) than one of his early experimental films remade on a higher budget, with a small group of 'scanners' (warrior-telepaths) fighting off a sinister mind-war army that is backed, indirectly, by industry and the state. Part conspiracy thriller, part political tract, it is Cronenberg's most coherent movie to date, drawing a dark (but bland) world in which corporate executives engineer human conception to produce ever more powerful mental samurai. And he punctuates it with spectacular set piece confrontations which really do dramatise the abstract, ingenious premise. As always, there's a nagging feeling that the script is not quite perfectly realised on screen, but Patrick McGoohan's bizarre cameo performance, and the extraordinary moral and sexual ambiguity of the final scanning contest, more than make up for it.

Author: CA 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

User reviews of this film

  • Miche said...
    Posted on Mar 14 2009 10:53 My grandfather was the helicopter pilot Lloyd Ayers he never mentioned it. So my sibs and I are all high watching this great gore film When the pilot comes into view we all stand up and yell in this packed theater "That's my granpa!!" Oh and David is a brilliant genius I love every film his use of the colour blue is so awesome he remembers home and outs those colors in every film
    Report as inappropriate

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields


Cast & crew

Director: David Cronenberg

Producer: Claude Héroux

Cast: Jennifer O'Neill, Stephen Lack, Patrick McGoohan, Lawrence Dane, Michael Ironside, Adam Ludwig, Robert Silverman full cast

Genre(s): Science Fiction

Duration: 103 mins

Related articles


Features

Making a name for himself

Making a name for himself

Sin Nombre's Cary Joji Fukunaga learned his lessons well.

To the letter

Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.

Mind over matter

David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.

Fool's gold

Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.

We are the championed

Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."

A history of violence

Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.

True romantic

James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.

Playing in the dark

MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.

Junk bonds

Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.