Clevercell Very disappointing...

Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

I-Am-The-Movie-Addict Being a long admirer of long-forgotten, missed-out, and esp.criterion collections, this film was a big and unexpcted surprise for me. This was not because i was walking a criterion film after a month but because it was sheerly different from what films are and what they use to be.Coming back to this title, "My Dinner with Andre(1981)" this film basically can be described in simple words such as a 2 hour long therapeutic conversation over a dinner between two people who were meeting after a long period of time.Keeping me review short and simple. what really puts you towards admiring the film is the basis of the telling and what it want to convey through simple words and yet iceberg theory kinda exists in those letters. If you are kind a philosophical person who loves to know about their desire of what life is and other related aspects then this film is for you as the actors in the film namely , Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn the main leads creates wonder chemistry and aura that never lets you go away from the film despite sometime your yawning and boriness comes in and tries to delude you away.With this, this film is a clearly no-no to action junkies and normal movies goers as this realm is not meant for them and this film wouldn't go pass your normal kind of entertainment which you'll come looking towards this film.In simple words, do watch it and judge it as your heart will thinking about it.I give a rating of 9/10 stars for being what it is. True. Simple. Real. Unforgettable. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004CURZCA

buddhist-06426 This movie exudes intelligent dialogue and thought. Every time I watch this movie I start contemplating how I have lived my life (currently 75). I definitely lived like Wally but now wished I had been Andre. It has made me realize that thinking outside the box is necessary to fully enjoy one's being alive.

powermandan My Dinner With Andre is a movie anybody in the world could have made. Just place a camera in a spot and turn it on. Woop-dee-doo! Instead of the movie actually being a pleasure to watch, it is just two acquaintances eating dinner together and having a conversation. Less than ten minutes take place outside of the restaurant and less than fifteen minutes take place with the men out of their table. Very simplistic films like this have potential to fall hard on their faces and totally suck. In order for simplistic movies like these to succeed, the dialogue needs to be at an extra high calibre. My Dinner With Andre wasn't even close to sucking.My Dinner With Andre is partially a true story. Before dinner, Wallace Shawn gives a voice-over of who he is and what he says is all true. He is invited by Andre Gregory to have dinner with him. Andre Gregory plays himself. I think that the only false things are some of the stories they tell. Also, their conversation must've been written and memorized. They couldn't just wing it. Good thing they wrote it and took the time to put lots of thought into a meaningful, provocative conversation.Shawn and Gregory have dinner at a fancy New York restaurant and talk about a variety of topics. Some of what they talk about can be a bit boring, but not all of it is. Gregory returns from a trip and shares his experience with Shawn and tells him how to live life to the full. They talk about how downhill the world has come and people becoming pseudo-robots. So much of what they talk about is so exciting and intellectual. All of what they say results in automatic imagery: the audience gets a clear image in their heads of what they are talking about. So this movie can also trigger imagination as well as gaining an insight about the world we live in and how to enjoy life. My Dinner With Andre doesn't have action, or car-chases, or profanity, or sex, just two men have a conversation at a nice restaurant.

David Conrad For all of its success at being something unique, a movie that consists almost entirely of two men talking to each other over dinner, "My Dinner With Andre" is also quite masterful in its use of some of the basics of storytelling and screencraft. It is particularly adept in its use of callback. One of the first things Wallace Shawn says to Andre Gregory when they meet at the restaurant, a long-delayed meeting Wallace tells us he has been dreading, is that Andre looks great. Andre replies that he feels terrible. Much later in the film, at a point when this early exchange might have been forgotten, Andre tells Wallace a story of the one person in a crowd who told him he looked terrible when everyone else had been blindly or artificially telling him he looked wonderful. Wallace reacts in his usual manner, with the pained squint and forced smile of someone who is not sure whether the person he is talking to is sane, and who is trying to decide whether to react honestly or with polite artificiality.The conversation between them is sufficiently strange to provoke that kind of reaction from Wallace, who for most viewers is surely the more relatable of the two with his love of simple pleasures like coffee and electric blankets and his skepticism of Andre's new age mysticism, but the way their back-and-forth escalates is smooth and comprehensible. There are clear themes established through early repetition. Nazism recurs again and again in Andre's dialogue, probably because its brutal enforcement of homogeneity is the antithesis of his utopian vision of complete individual autonomy. The theater is a recurring topic of discussion and an allegory for life, and the two men's close familiarity with specific directors, plays, and artistic schools provide a grounding that keeps their real concerns—life and death and the roles and performances of everyday existence—from becoming formless abstractions. The movie is a unique and arty experiment, yes, but the script is tightly-structured and that structure is adhered to even as the actors steadily ramp up the intensity of their performances.It is Wallace, as the stoic everyman, who has his foot on the pedals, rather than the more freewheeling and dynamic Andre. For a long time, Wallace's desire to avoid confrontation leads him to react with bemused, fearful, and puzzled silence to Andre's increasingly odd stories and claims of spiritual breakthroughs. This is the uncomfortable, strained conversation that Wallace dreaded at the beginning. Wallace's fear that the dinner would be awkward leads him to behave in just such a way to ensure that it is, through his non-committal or non-sequitur responses that only lead to awkward silences. But what Andre is offering him, he slowly realizes, is the chance to have a conversation that is honest and therefore not a chore. When Wallace begins to react as his own genuine self rather than as an accommodating version of himself, and to tell Andre "what I really think about all this," the conversation becomes more rapid, more elevated in pitch, but also less pained. It's a slow build over the course of the film until Wallace is almost shouting in the middle of the posh Manhattan restaurant, a setting which by this time is almost forgotten. The conversation, now two-way, has become all-absorbing.The editing, too, is an area in which the great care it took to produce the film belies an adjective like minimalist. Cuts often come mid- word or at least mid-sentence, and this creates the impression of an unbroken conversation instead of one achieved in several takes on different days. There are several camera positions, but zooms are also used when a story of Andre's is particularly emotional and his voice begins to quiver. This helps to generate sympathy for him and to overcome our Wallace-like incredulity. The timing of the cuts also works to create humor, particularly in the early going when we see Wallace's reaction to particularly outrageous pronouncements by Andre.This film is an unprecedented flight of fancy, but it flies by the grace of a deceptively controlled script and production. It gets down to the brass tacks of existence, not cheaply, but through the creation of two distinctive and likable protagonists. Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory are attentive to the needs of the audience and proficient with the tools of their medium. They are masters of art and of the art of living.