Well, the title pretty much says it all. List some of your favorite films that rely heavily on dialogue. Clerks is a good example, as is almost any other movie by Kevin Smith.
Glengarry Glen Ross and other film versions of Mamet plays.
The ultimate: My Dinner with Andre
You start a thread like this and take away my top choice immediately.
I would say every Kevin Smith movie except Jersey Girl. (It was crap)
Pulp Fiction was so great because of the dialogue.
Mister Roberts & 12 Angry Men.
Jim
Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. I really hope they do a third, in about ten more years. (Okay, five years. I’m impatient.)
The Lion in Winter.
Sailboat
Every Woody Allen movie since 1977.
Before Last Call?
Suddenly, Last Summer (actually, almost any movie made from a Tennessee Wiliams play fits the bill)
Casablanca
There are director/writers like David Mamet, who actually started as a playwright and transitioned to writing and directing movies when it became clear that movies are the ultimate market for his scripts anyway. More interestingly, there’s a group of director/writers who broke through to success in the late 1980’s through the mid-1990’s who have always thought of themselves as movie people, even though their skills are clearly in writing dialogue. I think of them as “the children of Woody Allen,” since I think Allen is the original master of this kind of film. His characters tend to be bright, articulate people who endlessly analyze their relationships and themselves. They often don’t solve anything with their conversations but just talk their problems to death. The newer director/writers who work this way are Richard Linklater, Whit Stillman, Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, and Spike Lee. Although I don’t know his films very well, I understand that Noah Baumbach makes similar sorts of movies.
MASH is essentialy dialouge driven, with no real plot.
Most of Robert Altman’s films are heavy on dialogue. Altman is famous for his overlapping dialogue. It’s easy to miss much of what’s being said in them because it’s often just muttered in the background or covered up with other people’s talking.
I think it’s fair to say the Brothers Coen make fantastic “dialogue” movies. Maybe not of the over-analyzing type, but they can certainly create unique characters with a ton of fantastic dialogue being thrown around: Miller’s Crossing; The Big Lebowski; Raising Arizona; The Hudsucker Proxy; Fargo; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; Barton Fink; to name a few. These movies just wouldn’t be the same without the kinds of words and conversations the Coen brothers give them.
The Stepford Wives relies heavily on dialogue.
CATS
A Man for All Seasons, essentially nothing except dialogue between Thomas More and those around him.
Certainly not a perfect movie, but Roger Dodger has some terrific screeds on sex and marketing, with Scott Campbell taking an unusual turn at playing the resident scumbag. I like Campion’s choices of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, though I’m not sure I want to see a third installment; I have my own storyline of what happens after the end of Sunset and it’s not an especially happy one. (Though I’ve shamefully never seen it, apparently there’s a clip in Waking Life featuring the couple in some kind of alternate future or somesuch.)
There are several SFX in it so perhaps it doesn’t count, but the Kaufman/Jonze film Adaptation has some great dialog. Mamet, of course, is so distinctively talky that his dialog actually has a distinct cadence and meter; even in films like Ronin and Spartan, which are nominally action-thrillers, the dialog contributes significantly to the film.
Then there’s my if-it-can-only-be-one selection, Rear Window. Since the hero is wheelchair-bound, there’s virtually nothing he can do but talk until the last five minutes. And yet, Hitchcock manages to make it one of the most suspenseful movies ever filmed.
Stranger
I have to go with Mamet too: Oleanna.
Every Kevin Smith movie ever.
His Girl Friday/The Front Page. The dialogue never stops, even in the middle of madcap action. You have to watch multiple times to catch all the jokes.
I have to respectfully disagree on this one. Rear Window is one of my favorite movies of all time, and Hitchcock was working with one of his best screenwriters, (John Michael Hayes), who definitely wrote a great screenplay with some memorable dialogue (particularly the banter between Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly). But it’s not really a dialogue-centric movie. I think Hitchcock was mostly a visual director (which isn’t completely redundant – Kevin Smith is a dialogue director, if that makes sense), and Rear Window in particular is about the watching and being watched, rather than what’s being said. He could have made it a silent movie without losing too much of the movie’s power – and maybe it would have made it an even better movie.
Something old: The Maltese Falcon, a movie remarkable not so much for the MacGuffin (although it defines MacGuffins, IMO), but for the sparkling dialogue.
Something new: The Big Kahuna, a movie very clearly based on a play and with only four speaking parts, but all about the dialogue.
Daniel