If you don’t like movies which are largely people standing around talking, this is one to skip. But if you do, it has some wonderful stuff. Great writing which is too complex to be readily quotable, so you haven’t heard it done to death by wits. Funny in some parts, thought provoking in others, with a huge helping of WTF. Plus, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth!
It also has the passage which is my sig on another board: “Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. Must have been shattering. Stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it.”
In The Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors. I was going to recommend all of Neil LaBute’s movies, but I can’t in good conscious recommend the guy who wrote the screenplay and directed the remake of The Wicker Man.
I can recommend all of the aforementioned Whit Stillman’s movies - Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days Of Disco, all worth seeing.
Another recommendation: Night On Earth by Jim Jarmusch, five episodes about nightly taxi rides in different cities. Other than driving and talking, nothing much happens, but it’s one of my favourite movies.
Richard Linklater movies (like Before Sunrise and Before Sunset) tend to be pretty talky. See Tape for another example (also featuring Ethan Hawke). Also check out Linklater’s first movie Slacker (not to be confused with Slackers).
Wendell Wagner and Morbo mentioned Whit Stillman and that’s the first name that popped into my head on reading your OP. “The Last Days of Disco” is one I especially enjoyed, being a film set in the very early 1980s about a gang of young New Yorkers whose lives revolve one way or another with getting into what is plainly supposed to be Studio 54 near the end of its days.
Faveourite quote from that film and one i’ve sometimes pondered:
“You know that Shakespearean admonition, “To thine own self be true”? It’s premised on the idea that ‘thine own self’ is something pretty good, being true to which is commendable. But what if ‘thine own self’ is not so good? What if it’s pretty bad? Would it be better, in that case, *not *to be true to thine own self?.. See, that’s my situation.”
Although I love the cast and I’m interested in the subject matter, I had a hard time with this movie. It didn’t seem like dialogue so much as people reading essays to each other. I wonder what Mamet would have done with it.
Like AMFAS, Inherit the Wind, and 12 Angry Men, many of the other mentions here have been based on successful stage plays, so you’d expect them to depend on dialog.
I’ll throw in Becket and A Streetcar Named Desire, as well as any movie of a Shakespeare play.