12 Angry Men to My Dinner with Andre to Before Sunrise. The films whose entire substance is what people say to each other across a table.
Dialogue-heavy cinema is one of the most-difficult forms. The audience has to remain engaged across long sequences of people simply talking — without action, without significant visual variation, without conventional dramatic escalation. The films that succeed at this form do so by treating the dialogue as the dramatic substance rather than as the medium through which other drama is conveyed.
Our picks.
Quentin Tarantino's filmography is, in some sense, the largest single contemporary contribution to dialogue-heavy cinema. Pulp Fiction's Royale-with-cheese conversation. Reservoir Dogs's Madonna-and-tipping debate. Inglourious Basterds's twenty-minute opening farmhouse interrogation. Kill Bill's confrontations across the kitchen and dining-room tables. Django Unchained's Candyland dinner sequence.
What Tarantino has demonstrated, across thirty years, is that contemporary mainstream cinema can sustain extended dialogue sequences if the dialogue is interesting enough on its own terms. This was, in 1992, a structural argument against the prevailing studio assumption that audiences would not tolerate long talky sequences. The argument has been won; subsequent serious-cinema directors routinely include 10-15 minute dialogue scenes that the pre-Tarantino studio system would have insisted on cutting.