Is My Dinner with Andre a fairly obscure film

11, 1981, this seminal art-house flick invited us to eavesdrop on 110-minutes of dialogue between two people who deliver hot takes and profundities that nobody asked for. And yet, “My Dinner With André” is just as fresh 40 years later.

In 1999, Ebert added the film to his Great Movies essay series, starting the retrospective review by stating: "Someone asked me the other day if I could name a movie that was entirely devoid of clichés. I thought for a moment, and then answered, My Dinner with Andre."

Thanks to its cult status, references to the film occasionally show up in pop culture poking fun at its minimalistic presentation and extremely simple premise. Perhaps most famously, one episode of The Simpsons jokingly featured Martin Prince ...

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Over bites of food, the two talk: about their careers, politics, society, the meaning of life–and everything in between. Exceptional and acclaimed on its release, MY DINNER WITH ANDRE now feels even more astonishing - a remarkably prescient, honest, and audacious piece of influential filmmaking (The New York Times called it “the original podcast”).

Wally and Andre represent two different world views, the former the rational man, the latter the mystic. There is no final consensus. My Dinner With Andre is driven by the inherent interest in Andre's unusual and mystical experiences, punctuated increasingly by Wally's comic common sense.

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Like many great movies, “My Dinner With Andre” is almost impossible to nail down. “Two men talk and eat (in real time) at a fancy New York restaurant,” writes CineBooks. Wrong, and wrong.

Seemingly nonchalant, borderline delirious, My Dinner with André is the result of an inspired collaboration among its actor-writers, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, and its director, Louis Malle. In the decades since its 1981 debut, this tiny, impeccably crafted independent movie has inspired myriad prose pieces and a slew of witticisms that riff on its title. Nothing, however, captures its eccentricity and perhaps the reason for its effect on viewers as neatly as this line from Vincent Canby’s New York Times review: “At times,” Canby wrote, “My Dinner with André suggests a reunion of Christopher Robin (Mr.