With winking apologies to Jim Morrison, Richard Linklater is the Chameleon King of modern American cinema, an indie auteur who burst onto the scene with 1991’s Slacker and 1993’s Dazed and Confused (still the preeminent evocation of high school ennui and hormonal imbalance) and has ever since steadfastly refused to be pegged down, either by genre or stylistic mode.

Linklater's latest film is Fast Food Nation, a dramatic modification of Eric Schlosser’s eye-opening, investigatory non-fiction novel of the same name, and it takes an impressive and humanistic aerial view of the fast food industry's death-grip on American culture, showing how cows and illegal immigrants alike are equally exploitable and expendable in a system that values haste and the bottom line above all else. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here. Furthermore, an interview with Linklater will follow later this week, but for an interview with costar Greg Kinnear, click here.