Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

VividSimon Simply Perfect

Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

ElMaruecan82 Have you ever caught bribes of such an interesting conversation you couldn't resist the temptation of listening, or even getting involved? Well, as soon as the titular André (Grégory playing himself) talks, we're natural-born listeners. You may think it's a minimalist experimental movie about two men talking, but it's all in the talk. And thanks to Louis Malle's astute directing and André's voice and body language, the words create a whole world and make everything happen in our minds. André, a producer, spent five years discovering the experimental theater in Poland, underground communities in Scotland and monasteries in Tibet, and finally he came back to share his experience with Wallace aka Wally, played by Wallace Shawn. And we visualize everything, the false burial, the hallucinations, the monk standing on his fingers. Despite the film's austere minimalism, what we've got is a super-power to communicate... on an epic level.Next to André, there's Wally, a struggling playwright, in an era where theater is obviously declining. These two men, who don't look the same, one elf-looking, another rather elegant and seductive, share the same love for theater, and certainly arts. They are also rational, literate men in their 30's/40's, and they don't have steady jobs, their revenues don't depend on physical efforts or regular wages, but on talents relying on inspirations, visions and other abstractions. So both Wally and André can afford the luxury of such a conversation, but they're also committed and have material responsibilities. Wally's wife (or girlfriend) must work on night to pay the bills, and André has a family. They're obviously caught between the daily urgency of life, and the eternal quest for its meaning that is so inherent to the world of Arts. Andre was found crying after watching Bergman's "Autumn Sonata" and was moved by Ingrid Bergman's confession that she couldn't only live in her Art, realizing that reality is a double-edged sword with alienating effects.Indeed, in the real world, we all are performers, incapable to express a genuine and sincere sentiment, incapable to question our happiness, beyond all the roles that life affects to us. It's no wonder, people deserted theaters since the world has turn into something like a theater… even a prison camp. But while these statements come later after a series of enumeration of André's five years of self-discovery, they could've turned the conversation into a one-sided performance if it wasn't for Wally's answer.Wally, who struck as a rather passive and fascinated listener, defensively and nervously retorts that there's something innately scary (and no less alienating) in these so-called quests, these obligations to go climb a mountain in order to find meanings to this or that, and then renounce to a simple comfort because it's meaningless. What is extraordinary is how visionary and relevant the conversation is, as if the world was as stressful in 1981 as now, 35 years later, and I couldn't decide which one I could relate to. I was like living my recent life in a movie, and it made me realize that I'm only 4 years younger than Shawn, and I'm in a somewhat similar existential crisis.I find this world extremely oppressive, and the Internet didn't help. Whenever I watched the news, it was always the same bullshit everywhere, the good guys vs. the bad guys, … and when I click on alternate news website, I get twice angrier, angry because we never hear them, and because it might be true. I don't even know if I should cry or laugh about that whole Trump campaign and the fact that we might have a Third World War very soon, … so, I promised myself to live in a bubble and never watch the news or anything that isn't fun and entertaining. I'd rather adopt the cowardly attitude of Wally, because I'm wise enough to know where I don't have the upper hand. I don't know."My Dinner With Andre" doesn't provide answers, but there will be hope as long as people will struggle to find any. I live in France where religion has became the Public Enemy #1, but I think it's again cold rationalism that inspired this intolerance, there's no good or bad spirituality, it's the very quest of transcendence that counts, not the result. The conversation is like those we have with our friends, when we try to solve the world's problem in one night, as long as such conversations will happen, that's enough to restore faith in humanity. Maybe André wasn't sure either about his solutions but it's a friendship story, and it's the mark of friend to unburden himself from his own angst and frustration and allow you to get relieved for some pain you'd have, through talking and communicating. And fittingly, after the dinner, instead of the subway, Wally took the cab and rediscovered some spots that all reminded him of childhood memories. The conversation had an effect, like Saint-Exupéry (whom André often mentioned): Wally started looking with his eyes instead of living mechanically.I can't express with the same quality of words how the film mirrored my own life. Was it a coincidence that the same day, my best friend called me, and urged to decide what to do with my life even if it had to jeopardize my marriage? Like Wally says, just because you read something in a fortune cookie doesn't mean it was addressed to you, but then he mentions the idea of someone traveling in a plane and reading in his horoscope that he shouldn't take it, which was exactly the subject of a screenplay I wrote (!)And André then says that it's only after envisaging the possibility of leaving his wife that he resurrected the passion, as if sometimes you need to take the risk to lose something to realize what it's worth. That night, I embraced my wife as tenderly as I could.

SnoopyStyle Wally Shawn (Wallace Shawn) is a 36 year old struggling playwright in NYC. He's also a struggling actor and his girlfriend is a waitress to pay the bills. He reluctantly goes to have dinner with Andre Gregory (Andre Gregory) who is a former friend and colleague. Andre had disappeared over the years traveling the world.It's a lot of long winding monologues. I struggled to get invested in the conversation. This is a daring theatrical exercise but I don't feel connected to Andre's stories. It does have a hypnotic tone which can be fascinating but I also found it pompous. NYC is not Auschwitz. It's a mostly one-way conversation and Andre won't shut up. The twist isn't that surprising. Andre turns from a pompous blow-hard to a crazy pompous blow-hard. Wally is disappointing in his manic failing defense of science. At least, the ending has some back and forth.

JT-Kirk Philosophy, existentialism, transcendentalism all collide over quail dinner. Some may see this movie as a time-suck, when in fact it's not, it's compelling and lets the viewer feel as if he's dining at the next table, listening in on something beyond the normal dinner conversation. There's no question as to how anybody else on the screen or talked about feels, it's simply two men having conversation, and that conversation ends up being exceptionally colorful and deep and full of crap at times, but never boring.For the first quarter, it feels as if Andre's existentialist dilemmas are so farcical and ridiculous that they must be pretense, yet once the infinitely-traveled (both the world and the being) Andre calls his own behavior out as abhorrent, things flip on their ear and get your attention.Wally and Andre agree and disagree on the nature of (then-modern) life within the same breaths, rarely exposing anything other than a friendly listening ear, hardly daring to show conflict as that would be outrageous in a conversation such as this between these two people.Some of what Andre says about the fundamentals of society have been proved prescient when a trip on the bus has the majority of riders interacting only with their phones, never truly communicating or living with those people around them. In that way, it's impossible 33 years later not to view truths in the wild stories being told by a man who may not be as nuts as he seems at times, but definitely has let his enlightenment cloud his ability to actually live his life. Yet time after time, we are faced with the very real possibility that Andre's crisis comes from losing his mother, an event which comes up over and over in tales - or maybe he's right on track, and using that event only as a stinging example of the blind men describing the elephant.Wally meanwhile plays the polite ear for a time, then a sounding board, finally even making counterpoints to a much more "here and now" life, but he never fully gives himself over to fighting his friend's ideas, and he rarely shows a hint that he might be bored or glazing over. The fact that Wally, our "protagonist" - if that's what you can call his role - refuses to disengage with Andre the way so many of their friends have shows a kindness and an ability to truly take in the ideas behind a man seemingly broken and on the fringes of society.I remember overhearing talk like this when I was a kid, some of those conversations were the best ideas and some were the absolute worst dreck. How they were used ended up being where their true value mattered, and this film touches on that, but doesn't force it down the viewer's throat. By the end of the few hours, the viewer is a little exhausted, the voice-over narration bookends feel clumsy, but - despite a lack of answers or anything of that nature - something happened and because of that, the viewer felt. That's where entertainment and art must collide to be successful. Part of me would love to find out how Andre's wife and children, how Wally's girlfriend, how their theater community friends, even how the waitstaff dealt with the repercussions of that conversation, there are a lifetime of ideas that have come and gone since this film was made, a near-total abandonment of the type of "self-examination at all costs" behavior Andre lives by in the film, so in that way the film leaves us with the possibility of going anywhere we want, viewing sequels in our own minds. That's a strong tale told then, a movie that's just two New Yorkers having dinner being so much more without pushing at all.Some audiences, perhaps most, won't be able to take this film in. It is longwinded and "nothing happens", it doesn't even entirely look good at times, but where it succeeds is in engaging far beyond the audience's expectations without anything other than some dinner, conversations, and coffee.

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.