I'm Alex Schwartz. I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Vincent Cunningham and this is Critics at Large, a New Yorker

podcast for the culturally curious. Each week we're going to talk about a big idea that's showing

up across the cultural landscape and we'll trace it

through all the mediums we love books movies television music art and I always want to

talk about celebrity gossip too of course we hope you'll join us for new episodes each Thursday.

Follow critics at large, today, wherever you get podcasts. Pushkin. This is talk easy. I'm San Francisco writer director Richard Linklator.

Linklater belongs to a class of independent filmmakers you can identify by just saying their last names.

Soderberg, Lee, Tarantino, Fincher, the Coans,

all of whom played a significant role in the indie film boom of the 1990s.

But for many young aspiring filmmakers,

it was Link later who offered the clearest road map,

a way of making movies outside the conventional means

of production, far away from Hollywood.

Instead, Link later told stories in and about Texas, where he came of age in the 1970s and

80s.

Slacker, Days and days and confused the Newton boys Bernie boyhood everybody wants

some not to mention his non Texas work the before trilogy school of, me in Orson Wells.

I can keep going, but there's no one quite like Richard Link later.

He's a kind of cinematic polymath, a man who, at 63 years old old remains as curious and open about new stories as he did in his early 20s

when he moved to Austin with nothing more than $18,000 and a dream to direct.

His latest project is a Neo-Noir set in New Orleans entitled Hit Man.

It stars Glenn Powell as Gary Johnson, a straight-laced college professor who also moonlights as a fake hitman for the New Orleans Police Department.

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