You only hear about people criticizing a movie for having bad dialogue
who has written “good dialogue”?
What do you mean by good dialogue? Lifelike? Deeply heartfelt and emotionally moving? Clever?
I love the snappy banter of His Girl Friday, written by Charles Lederer and Ben Hecht, driected by Howard Hawks, and delivered by Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. I never hear clever, quick exchanges like that in real life, so I value it even more on film.
Pretty much anything by Quentin Tarantino would qualify, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill being prime examples.
My Dinner with Andre.
Casablanca
Duck Soup
Annie Hall
Shakespeare in Love
Diner (there’s a conversation over the end credits that keeps people from leaving the theater).
Paths of Glory
The Third Man
I thought the dialogue from Clerks and Chasing Amy was very well done.
Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid
The Sting
All The President’s Men
On Golden Pond
You beat me too it.
I actually think the original star wars trilogy has some pretty great dialogue, but a lot of it seems limited to one-liners that stuck with us.
Well done and relentless!
The Thin Man
Juno
The Lion In Winter is king of snappy, witty dialogue. Hepburn and O’Toole chew through the (limited) scenery like buzzsaws, but it’s a delight listening to them while they do so.
As a rule of thumb (though I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions), movies written and directed by a well-known filmmaker tend to have good dialogoue (Quentin Tarrentino, Kevin Smith, Woody Allen, the Coen Brothers); movies written by a team of screenwriters, none of whose names mean anything to the average moviegoer, tend to have bad dialogue.
How about Oh Brother, Where art thou? There’s some gift of the gab in that.
Anything by Aaron Sorkin.
Namely The American President and A Few Good Men
Glengarry Glen Ross has some great dialog, IMO.
IANA film buff, but I tend to think there are really 2 schools of “good dialogue”. There’s the snappy repartee sort that people think of - the Tarantino / Whedon / Kevin Smith stuff, and then there’s the sort of dialogue where it’s accurate enough in the context that it doesn’t pull you out of the setting. It’s “believable” for lack of a better term. It’s also almost the opposite of the snappy repartee kind of thing; while I enjoy the banter in say… Kevin Smith movies, nobody actually talks like that in real life. What I’m talking about is the ones where the dialogue is written such that it’s absolutely believable that those words would come out of that character’s mouth at that moment.
The latter one’s hard to think of a good example- it’s kind of chameleonic by nature, but I’m sure someone else has a good example to post.
There’s some banter in it but I think Trainspotting has believable and witty dialogue. Another example - not a movie but a miniseries- is the dialogue on Lonesome Dove. Especially, any of it that involves Gus & Call. Both may be cheating since the source of the good dialogue started in the original novels.
That’s the first thing I thought of when I saw the thread title.
Also, The Philadelphia Story and The Third Man (already mentioned).
Actually, regarding The Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday, you can probably look to most any Cary Grant movie. He was pretty good at speaking and his lines were always well written (and it didn’t hurt that he was usually paired up with a leading lady that could ‘keep up with him’ so to speak).
The only thing I know by Aaron Sorkin is The Newsroom (a TV Show), but if the OP didn’t limit this to movies, I would have brought that up.
I’m with Lightray on this. The first movie that pops into my head when people say “good dialogue” is The Lion in Winter.