Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Simone ★★★★½ 16

  Lately, I've been reconnecting with a lot of former friends and acquaintances from high school and college. And no, I don't mean on Facebook. I mean sitting down and having an actual conversation, filled with meaningful dialogue, heart wrenching regrets, near-death experiences, and spirited philosophical debates. While watching My Dinner with Andre, sometimes I checked out from whatever they were talking about and let my mind wander to things relevant to my own life. By the end I was moved and refreshed, just like I feel after these dinners/meet-ups I've been having that are becoming more and more frequent as I get older.

  I can't say I have anything in common with white male playwrights, one of whom is content…

• 

  Review by Gabriel Gundacker 6

  Maybe another time but probably not. Hard to watch with my parents walking around the kitchen wondering to themselves why in the fuck I would watch this. Mom did stop in the living room to say, “wow, he’s sure talking a lot!”

• 

  Review by Marcissus ★★★★ 1

  Wallace walks to the restaurant like a long-dead ghost wandering to no place in particular through a bustling city of the living, he appears uncertain and anxious and blue, two hours later he will walk out of the restaurant with his feelings not inverted but irrevocably various and eager and rose coloured. He looks at the passing streetlights with eyes that cry out "jesus christ, have these things always been here?" He instinctively connects these miraculous lights with memories that had long since been abandoned to the lonely chasms of his shadowy mind, left to rot under the label "unimportant/insignificant." He has dinner with Andre and they discuss many things. He says things like: "how can you say something like…

• 

  Review by Scumbalina ★★★★★ 2

  I watched this twice today. Wallace Shawn speaks from a place of familiar futility. He's the voice of the audience. Upon first viewing, I somewhat disliked Andre. He has the luxury of purchased hipster reality. He participates in quack cult-like retreats in foreign countries as away to reconnect with his humanity. Wally struggles to pay his bills and is content with the simple details of life, but in turn never bothers to ask important questions or take any risks.

  Having lived in poverty for many years I will say that questioning your relationships and goals is a privilege of the rich. Travel is impossible, you're lucky if you can make your way out to a party that you probably don't…

• 

  Review by Ethan Colburn ★★★★

  On my last day of physics class in my junior year of high school, my teacher Mr. Stern gave a slideshow of "Mr. Stern's Life Lessons." Everyone was done with their final, and so seemed pretty distracted, but his third life lesson really hit me.

  "Being Happy isn't the same as being numb."

  Junior year had been a difficult time for me and it hit me how much time I spent playing dumb games on my phone trying to numb my experiences. Six years later, and sadly I often resort to the same coping mechanism, though it comes in different forms.

  My dinner with Andre is the movie-version of this effect.

  In the age of social media and phones it…

• 

  Review by Vinny Simms ★★★½ 1

  somewhere Richard Linklater just got a boner

• 

  Review by David Chen ★★★★ 2

  The OG rambling 2-hour film podcast.

• 

  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★★★ 56

  "The world comes in quite fast."

  Louis Malle met and cast Wallace Shawn in a bit role in Atlantic City on the basis of his friendship with screenwriter John Guare. Thank heavens for chance meetings such as this. For when Shawn and André Gregory decided to fashion a screenplay entitled My Dinner with André around playfully modified versions of their public personae, Malle needed little convincing and was able to pull off the job immaculately for less than half a million dollars.

  The premise is alluringly simple: at the urging of a third party, playwright Wallace Shawn reluctantly agrees to meet his erstwhile mentor André Gregory for a high-end dinner in a posh New York City restaurant. Shawn's reluctance to…

• 

  Review by Jaime Rebanal ★★★★★ 14

  This whole conversation plays right in front of our eyes and there's never a moment in which it panders away. Yet the whole movie's primary focus is directed towards not what the film is about, but what it is that our subjects are discussing thoroughly. Louis Malle's My Dinner with André exposes a form of art which can be found right from seemingly simple conversation. It's an idea that on its surface seems very fairly small, but suddenly as we find ourselves pulled into this discussion, specific thoughts come into our mind that also go on to question how we're perceiving what we believe to be ordinary within our own lives, it's truly something more exciting than what could be…

• 

  Review by Jeff

  Oh my god.  He did it!  He said inconceivable!!  

  Rating: one billion stars for Wallace Shawn saying inconceivable.

• 

  Review by cuckoochanel ★★★★★ 29

  Entry 27 in the month-long NYC movie marathon is one of Richard’s all-time favorite films!

  An underemployed playwright submits to a long-avoided reunion with his former mentor, colleague and friend in Louis Malle’s philosophical two-hander, My Dinner with André. Wallace Shawn plays an iteration of himself, Wally, who trudges up from the grime of a pre-gentrified SoHo to begrudgingly meet a similarly adapted André Gregory at the upscale Café des Artistes in the Upper West Side for dinner after years of estrangement. 

  Shackled to thoughts of his meager existence, the stagnation of his work and income, and the execution of his daily rituals, Wally represents the viewer as an artistically intellectual everyman in this metaphysical hangout piece. André, by comparison,…

• 

  Review by spap1 ★★★★★ 8

  the existential crisis is real right now. i’ve been left in tears. it’s honestly insane the extent this mirrored the thoughts and queries i’ve been having about life lately. i honestly think it might have given me the push i’ve needed to change the way i live.

  i didn’t think anything could overtake Synecdoche, New York as my favourite film, but i think it’s finally come.

  there is an impossible amount of to unpick throughout this film, and i think that makes it all the more incredible that it was fit into a mere one hour and fifty minute runtime. i’m going to try and evoke at least one of the ideas that i got below. 

  ….

  If you’re just…