MY DINNER WITH ANDRÉ

In this captivating and philosophical film directed by Louis Malle, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn sits down with his friend the theater director André Gregory at a restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side, and the pair proceed through an alternately whimsical and despairing confessional about love, death, money, and all the superstition in between. Playing variations on their own New York–honed personas, Shawn and Gregory, who also cowrote the screenplay, dive in with introspective intellectual gusto, and Malle captures it all with a delicate, artful detachment. A fascinating freeze-frame of cosmopolitan culture, MY DINNER WITH ANDRÉ remains a unique work in cinema history.

"MY DINNER WITH ANDRÉ doesn't fit the usual definition of a great movie, but it has an inexhaustible, omnidirectional confidence. It's the most subliminal piece of magic realism—expansive, incantatory words jousting with monotonous matter—ever put on film. Playing amusingly distilled, intensified versions of themselves, Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn sprang this cantankerous cerebral doubles act—part doleful Vladimir and Estragon, part verbal Laurel and Hardy—on an unsuspecting world." - Howard Hampton, Artforum