Directed by Louis Malle • 1981 • United States
Starring Wallace Shawn, André Gregory
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.
Up Next in New York Stories
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Escape from New York
Directed by John Carpenter • 1981 • United States
Starring Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Isaac HayesIt’s the year 1997 and the dystopian hellscape of Manhattan has been turned into a maximum security prison. When the U.S. president’s plane is hijacked and crash lands on the island, it’s up to ha...
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Smithereens
Directed by Susan Seidelman • 1982 • United States
Susan Seidelman established her distinctive vision of New York City with this debut feature, the lo-fi original for her vibrant portraits of women reinventing themselves. After escaping New Jersey, the quintessentially punk Wren (Susan Berman)...
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Los Sures
Directed by Diego Echeverria • 1984 • United States
Diego Echeverria’s vivid portrait of South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the early 1980s captures the challenges the neighborhood faced: poverty, drugs, gang violence, crime, abandoned real estate, racial tension, single-parent homes, and inadequa...
