Critics reviews

The adaptation of Hermann Koch's brilliant biting satire, The Dinner, was a huge disappointment to me. Its far too famous cast made the story's otherwise hateful characters endearing enough to elide its intended savage social commentary. When the memory of this film fades away I suspect that all I will recall is the occasional glare from a penlight and the bawdy chortle of the critic sat next to me.

It's a bloated, laboured, state-of-bourgeois-morals drama, just about made watchable by some sharp acting (barring, of course, Gere's usual lacquered inertia).

At first it feels overly schematic, as the flashbacks are for the most part triggered, Family Guy-style, by one of the characters dropping an unelaborated reference to a past event. It's also irritating that whenever a particularly dramatic moment is recalled—and there are many—the picture looks like it was passed through an Instagram filter. The acting is superb, however, and Moverman and his actors compellingly escalate the antagonism at the dinner table

Moverman is purposely evoking current racial tensions in the U.S. in adapting Dutch novelist Herman Koch's The Dinner in this manner, but it's as topical commentary that the film is perhaps least successful... When it comes to seeing the four main characters verbally dueling with each other, pleading and rationalizing to themselves, though, The Dinner is an electrifying experience—and possibly an illuminating one.

I can't help but wonder what Kenneth Lonergan might have done with the screenplay if he were allowed to give it a once-over. The material, after all, is right up his alley. As it stands, The Dinner is a showcase for a superlative cast made frustrating, even maddening at times, by a narrative strategy that's simply _too busy_.