Review of My Dinner with Andre (1981) by Chris R — 05 Feb 2008

This film is complete magic. Two people sitting down for dinner and conversing for almost two hours shouldn't work as a film should it? That it does, and also manages to be one of the best movies I've seen is testament to its craft.

Wally and Andre (Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory) play distillations of themselves in Louis Malle's film - the script was apparently written off the back of numerous actual conversations they'd had. Nevertheless these are very clever characters - and the conversation they have is a masterful piece of storytelling from Andre, puntuated with Wally's realistic musings.

I had to get a shitty full screen R1 DVD of this, but its possible there's a better transfer available now. Either way this is an absolute must see. Brilliance.