Dialogue is a crucial element of storytelling in film, transforming simple exchanges into profound moments that resonate with audiences. Here are ten movies that exemplify the art of dialogue.
10 Movies with Amazing Dialogue
Certain movies elevate dialogue from mere exposition to a work of art. Exceptional dialogue can carry a plot when nothing else is going on in a story. The best dialogue emerges when characters have conflicting desires in every scene, creating natural tension through conversation rather than action. It can also give us naked, raw moments of emotion.
It’s challenging to narrow down a list of just 10 examples of movies with the best dialogue, but we’ve attempted to do so below. Let us know if your favorites made the list.
Before Sunrise
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Richard Linklater excels at creating entertaining conversations that feel real and natural as characters interrupt each other and follow trains of thought down different tangents. Ebert noted that “it’s mostly conversation … Linklater’s dialogue is weirdly amusing.” The authenticity comes through even though the dialogue is tightly scripted and almost never improvised, as he told Variety.
In Bruges
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Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy follows two hitmen awaiting orders in Belgium, featuring dialogue that balances profanity-laden humor with genuine philosophical depth about guilt and redemption. The Times noted specifically that the writer’s “meandering, melodically rhythmic dialogue and volcanic eruptions of profanity serve him well in this witty, wordy film.” McDonagh told IndieWire that the word “fuck” for him “is more about rhythm,” saying, “I listen to a character talk in my head and that’s what they say, that’s what I hear.”
The Man from Earth
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Written by Jerome Bixby and directed by Richard Schenkman, this sci-fi film consists almost entirely of conversation as a college professor reveals he’s been alive for 14,000 years. The story was Bixby’s final work, completed on his deathbed in 1998. Schenkman said that when he first read the script, “I fell in love with it immediately.” Producer Eric Wilkinson told We Are Movie Geeks that the screenplay’s power came from being “really an amazing script” that could work with minimal budget because it relied entirely on dialogue.
Brick
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Although some view this one as a little precious now, Rian Johnson’s neo-noir film transplants hard-boiled detective dialogue into a high school setting. Roger Ebert praised how the story “provides a rich source of dialogue, behavior, and incidents.” Johnson told CHUD, “We worked a lot on it. With Joseph in particular, we had a three-month period where we got together constantly and watched movies, talked about movies, and worked out exactly how we would make this weird language work. The first thing we tried was to forget about this formalized dialogue and do it completely naturally.”
Blue Jay
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This intimate black-and-white drama stars Sarah Paulson and Mark Duplass as former high school sweethearts who reconnect. This one, unlike Before Sunrise, was mostly improvised. Director Alex Lehmann told SAGIndie that they started with a two-page treatment that was “the most efficient two pages of writing I have ever seen.” Duplass confirmed this: “We had a 10-page outline that we were shooting from, and it was all resting on whatever chemistry Sarah and I could muster. It was all geared towards creating an environment where lightning can strike” (via CBC).
The Big Chill
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This ensemble drama follows old college friends reuniting after a suicide, giving dialogue extra weight as each character processes grief through conversation. Independent Magazine, which noted the film’s “talky” nature, spoke to editor Carol Littleton. “It was really all about nuance and tone and constantly weighing the dramatic value,” she said. “Looking for the small moments, the little remarks, that made the story.”
Glengarry Glen Ross
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David Mamet’s adaptation of his own play transforms a real estate office into a high-stakes verbal battleground where salesmen fight to survive, all while espousing the value of sales and business. “You have to write dialogue in a rhythmic way because human speech is rhythmic,” said Mamet (via MasterClass). “And if you listen to people having a conversation, what they’re doing is they’re creating rhythmic poetry. They’re filling in the pauses and capping each other’s speech and so forth in a way which is rhythmic.”
My Dinner with Andre
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This unique film features a single conversation between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, portrayed as fictionalized versions of themselves, as they discuss topics over dinner. It’s all talking, and the movie doesn’t have a traditional climax, but it’s engrossing. Criterion wrote that director Louis Malle’s eagerness to take the job “might have had to do with the challenge of making two men talking over dinner into a compelling cinematic experience.”
Clerks
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Kevin Smith’s low-budget debut follows convenience store workers Dante and Randal through one day of customer interactions and slacker conversations. Smith wanted the dialogue to be rapid-fire. “With Clerks, I was always like faster, faster. I mean, sometimes I would get to the point that the actors weren’t doing what I heard in my head. So I would just say, ‘Look, say it like this.’ Then I would do it and have them repeat it.”
Heat
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Michael Mann’s crime epic features a legendary 10-minute dialogue exchange between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino that was highly anticipated before the film’s release. Ebert wrote, “Above all, the dialogue is complex enough to allow the characters to say what they’re thinking: They are eloquent, insightful, fanciful, poetic when necessary. They’re not trapped with clichés. Of the many imprisonments possible in our world, one of the worst must be to be inarticulate – to be unable to tell another person what you really feel. These characters can do that. Not that it saves them.”
