The Criterion Collection

“If you want a break from all the summer bombast, My Dinner with André is out . . . in a fabulous new two-disc package,” suggests NPR’s Glenn McDonald in a review of the new Criterion special edition of Louis Malle’s 1981 high-minded gabfest. “Here’s a movie that more or less does the impossible: it consists entirely of two friends having a quiet conversation over dinner, and it’s riveting.”

Joining in the dialogue about this “fascinating, deceptively simple movie” is the National Post of Canada’s Chris Knight: “The film flies in the face of the show-don’t-tell rule of moviemaking, but so expertly that, even though you have just spent two hours watching two guys eat dinner, your mind’s eye will take away ideas, images, even sounds that exist only as spoken words.” Jen Chaney, in the Washington Post, writes that My Dinner with André is “cinema’s quintessential conversation.” And perhaps most persuasive is the Dallas Morning News’s Chris Vognar: “Listen to what André Gregory and Wallace Shawn actually say over their epic dinner, and you might just get your mind blown.”

You can also listen to critic Amy Taubin discussing the film on Blogtalkradio’s Back to Midnight program, broadcast Tuesday night and available now in a podcast. In the interview, Taubin (who wrote an essay for the release) analyzes the much-acclaimed (and parodied!) work from a film-critical and personal perspective: she was an actor in the sixties and early seventies and knew actor-writer Shawn and theater director Gregory, and the experimental-theater-world they discuss, well. She also shares her evolving feelings about the film. Today, she says, even more than at the time, “I’m incredibly moved by that idea of a passionate quest to find a transcendental experience, a meaning in life.”

Update (7 JUL 09): André is “one of Obama’s favorite movies,” according to André Gregory in a new interview in the San Francisco Chronicle.