My Dinner With Andre (#479)

In this captivating and philosophical film directed by Louis Malle, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn sits down with his friend the theater director Andr Gregory at a restaurant on New Yorks 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 Yorkhoned 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 Andr remains a unique work in cinema history.

SPECIAL FEATURES

High-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray

Interview from 2009 with actor-writers Andr Gregory and Wallace Shawn, conducted by their friend the filmmaker Noah Baumbach

My Dinner with Louis, a 1982 episode of the BBC program Arena in which Shawn interviews director Louis Malle

English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Amy Taubin and the prefaces written by Gregory and Shawn for the 1981 publication of the films screenplay