Slacker (1992)

Director Richard Linklater's shaggy-dog debut comes to video with all its antisocial charm intact. In fact, the TV screen may be the perfect place for this paean to couch-potato creativity. Unspooling amid the bohemian underculture of Austin, Tex., Slacker passes the viewer like a shared smoke from one twisted confrontation to another, drawing bemused links between matricide, Madonna's Pap smears, and the Smurfs. Some of the sequences are stronger than others, and the conceit is too laid-back to sustain the final half hour. Still, any movie in which a woman gets arrested for shoplifting and a passerby remarks, ''I know her. She was in my ethics class'' is definitely on to something. B+