In less than a decade, Richard Linklater has gone from making movies for $23,000 to making them for $27 million. His first nationally distributed feature, Slacker, featured a cast of some 100 unknown actors who worked for nothing; his 1998 feature, The Newton Boys, featured some of the hottest beefcake in Hollywood. Slacker was a storyless sortie into the world of disaffected youth; The Newton Boys was more like "the Butch Cassidy of the Nineties," according to Neva Chonin of Rolling Stone. In between these extremes, Linklater took a look at high school antics in Dazed and Confused, at romance and the art of conversation in Before Sunrise, and at alienated suburban youth in subUrbia, adapted from the play by Eric Bogosian. Whether contemporary or historical, "Linklater's films have all successfully captured youth just being themselves," according to Chris Gore in Film Threat.

Known for his deadpan humor and stream-of-consciousness treatments, Linklater...