The Dinner
The Dinner
R | 05 May 2017 (USA)
The Dinner Trailers

Two brothers and their wives meet up at a haute-cuisine restaurant to discuss what to do about a horrific crime that their sons committed together. As the quartet debate their options, the conversation reopens old wounds between the siblings.

Reviews
scottjburzynski

This seemed like the type of film I would typically enjoy, however there is nothing enjoyable about this film whatsoever.The first half is so slow-paced and drawn out that I almost completely lost interest before the actual point of the dinner was revealed. Once I got to that point, the premise of the film was *just* interesting enough to force myself to suffer through the meandering second half to find out what happens in the end... except there is no actual ending. It just stops, as if they suddenly ran out of film while shooting the final scene.Besides that, the sound editing made me want to punch my TV screen in the face. How, you ask? By starting with practically inaudible dialogue muttered under the breath, and cutting suddenly to blaringly loud transition music, and repeating that about 46 trillion times until I wore out the volume buttons on my remote.This might be the most excruciating film I've ever sat through.

... View More
jeffreynigro

Too many threads, no empathetic characters, crappy edits and a non-ending. A massive waste of talent and 2 hours of my time. Allegory? Even allegory needs coherence and this film had no cohesiveness whatsoever.

... View More
MovieCritic98

This is a terrible movie. Two sons of one of the families burn a homeless lady to death, and 3 of the 4 parents involved are perfectly fine with covering up the crime. They argue forever and the one parent (Richard Gere's character), that wants to do the right thing is finally worn down and agrees to go along with the cover-up. This movie is the kind of amoral drivel that rightfully gives Hollywood a bad name. And it is also extremely boring. I will be more careful to read reviews so I avoid this kind of excrement in the future. Hopefully, this review will help spare someone the loss of two hours of their life watching absolute garbage. I would have given it zero stars if I could.

... View More
John Plocar

I can't believe what I just saw. This film was simultaneously about nothing and yet a complete conglomeration of everything they could squeeze into 2 hours. The plot doesn't even actually come into play until an hour and a half into the film and even when that happens it makes no sense. I can't say a single good thing about this movie. Everything about this movie is...for lack of a better term...f*cked. The direction is f*cked. The story is f*cked. The characters are f*cked. The tone is f*cked. The editing is REALLY F*CKED. Everything about this movie, aside from a few good camera shots, is terrible. Everything. The acting somehow was terrible. When you have Richard Gere and Steve Coogan in a movie, I expect at least them to be good in their roles and not even they could escape the suckfest this film is.I wish I could say what this movie was even about, but even if I had a gun pointed directly at my head I couldn't tell you for sure what this movie is really about. Here's my best try though...okay...two older rich white couples with rich white problems go to a luxurious restaurant for dinner to have flashbacks about their spouses having cancer, mental disorders, their kids throwing basketballs through store shop windows, mommy issues, compare all their problems to the Battle of Gettysburg, and when they have the time they finally get around to talking out loud about how they should figure out whether or not to turn their sons in for murdering a homeless woman at an ATM by setting her on fire...which the ATM camera filmed...and they also filmed with their phones...and posted it on a discount YouTube site...But don't worry about any of that because by the end of it, NOTHING IS RESOLVED. It literally at the most awkward time I've ever seen a movie end, it cuts to black. The parents decide to wait a few days to think on whether they'll actually turn their boys in for murder, in the meantime they'll take a vacation. One of the parents (played by Steve Coogan) is crazy and attempts to murder his nephew (Richard Gere's son), which is one of the sons involved that is blackmailing Coogan's son. Gere and the wives arrive before Coogan can do anything, Gere beats up Coogan and they all call the boy on their phones to try to get a hold of him to make sure he's alright. I think they do get a hold of him, but it was unclear. Camera takes one last look at Coogan being winded from getting his butt kicked. Cut to black. Credits...screw this movie.Everything about this movie was shockingly incompetent. From relatively awkward to jaw dropping, God awful editing. Pretentious and hollow dialog and character writing. Nonsensical story with zero structure to it. Cheap looking cinematography that tries its hardest to look like it has a budget but falls short. The tone is about as stable as a man hanging himself from his busted ceiling fan to jerk off to crumpled pictures of goats...yeah, I dare you to get that image out of your head. Seriously, this movie is the definition of a train wreck. I sincerely wish I had just went to the train tracks near my apartment, laid down, and waited. It would have been a more productive use of my time instead of sitting around for 2 hours, waiting for this piece of crap to finally blow its own brains out as an ending.

... View More