My Dinner with Andre

This scripted literal "conversation piece"...was also acutely self-aware and just as much thought-provoking, offering a progressive cinematic paradigm... [Blu-ray]

The dining duo struggle with words between bites, groping for a recipe summoning the meaning of life. And in a movie that redefined as a surprising and inventive enduring classic, both leading man requisites and filmmaking conventions.

My Dinner with Andre is often celebrated for its audacity, but has now reached the point where it deserves similar credit for its prescience.

(It) is a downright transgressive film because it brazenly allows its characters to just talk. Actually it allows Andre to talk and, just as importantly, for Wally to listen.

... an intellectual bull session as cinematic performance piece...

What makes the film so intriguing and so beguiling and so utterly wonderful is the way it slowly reveals itself, uncoiling in ways that don't produce dramatic fireworks, but rather gradual realizations

But what an egg it is.

Louis Malle's film was unique and exceptional in 1981, and it's still fairly unusual. It's a lesson in the value of listening and squeezing riches about humanity out of the swag of talk

Witty, urbane, original and very dated.

It's all talk, most of it interesting.

Like watching paint dry, only less entertaining.

It's difficult to criticize the experiments of a movie that so boldly disregards most cinematic convention.