Diner

Diner is an often hilarious, frequently touching film. Read full review

A wonderful movie...It isn't remarkable visually, but features some of the best young actors in the country.

Levinson's dialogue feels fresh and improvised, yet it hits its mark every time, and the performances he gets are complex and original (particularly from Mickey Rourke, who plays a lothario with a late-blooming conscience) - enough so that Levinson's occasional forced "cinematic" effects cause barely a ripple in the smooth, naturalistic surface. Read full review

Diner isn't lavish or long, but it's the sort of small, honest, entertaining movie that should never go out of style, even in an age of sequels and extravaganzas. Read full review

The film is wonderfully cast and played, right down to the bit player (Ralph Tabakin) who shops suspiciously for a TV set: "I saw Bananzo and it was not for me." Read full review

It's a real writer's movie, happy to linger on a psychologically telling moment--and audiences expecting a big payoff may feel disappointed. "Diner" isn't the kind of movie that jumps up and down to please. But while seeming to traverse familiar ground, Levinson and his superb young cast are sprinkling it with sparkling insights. [19 Apr 1982, p.96]

Diner is often a very funny movie, although I laughed most freely not at the sexual pranks but at the movie's accurate ear, as it reproduced dialogue with great comic accuracy. Read full review

Barry Levinson's Diner is an extremely clever, slick male fantasy that takes some time to work out its mood and tone but ultimately blossoms into a moving film. [16 Apr 1982]

A serious and funny and subtle work - a work of art - that was easy to confuse with exploitation teeny-bopper quickies because it did what the quickies had tried to do. But Diner did it right. [22 Apr 1982]

Levinson’s self-penned 1982 directorial debut and the first of his “Baltimore films” is a disarming reminiscence on buddydom. Read full review

Not a lot to it, but the sense of period is acute, the script witty without falling into the crude pitfalls that beset other adolescent comedies, and the performances are spot-on. Read full review

Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Paul Reiser and Timothy Daly are terrific as the friends as are Ellen Barkin and Kathryn Dowling as the two females involved with different group members. Read full review

This is Hollywood's most mature treatment of the '50s-nostalgia theme so far, and the most accurate. Read full review

Authenticity isn't everything and "Diner" ends up an oddly disappointing nice try. [5 March 1982, p.B1]

This is not really riveting material if you didn't go to high school with these boys, and perhaps not even if you did. Played by Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon and Timothy Daly, they seem fundamentally decent, but hopelessly trapped in the limits of the time and place. That grubby atmosphere, looked upon as endearing, is the only thing the film has to offer, and while it's amusing at first, one quickly gets the idea. [5 March 1982, p.11]