In this captivating and philosophical film directed by Louis Malle, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn sits down with his friend the theater director André Gregory at a restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side. The pair proceed through an alternately whimsical and despairing confessional about love, death, money, and all the superstition in between, playing variations on their own New York–honed personas. Shawn and Gregory cowrote the screenplay and they serve up and chew on dialogue more savory than anything on the restaurant’s menu. They dive in with introspective intellectual gusto, and Malle captures it all with a delicate, artful detachment, a fascinating freeze-frame of cosmopolitan culture and bleeding-edge theater at this moment in time in NYC.