Diner

The last days of 1959 in Baltimore. A group of friends comes back together because one of them is about to get married. By day their lives are coming apart; at night they meet in the same diner and talk. The groom has set his fiancee a test on the football team and says the wedding is off if she fails it. It is Barry Levinson's first film as director. Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke and Kevin Bacon are in the cast. It nearly never opened. MGM considered shelving it after poor test screenings. The producer Mark Johnson got an unauthorised print to the critic Pauline Kael, who promised a rave regardless of what the studio decided, and delivered one. She called it a wonderful movie, not remarkable visually, but featuring some of the best young actors in the country. On a 5 million dollar budget it took 14.1 million. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 90 percent and Metacritic at 82. Mickey Rourke won Best Supporting Actor from the National Society of Film Critics and Levinson took Best Screenplay from the Boston Society of Film Critics. It began Levinson's Baltimore tetralogy, and became a television pilot in 1983 and a stage musical with music by Sheryl Crow in 2014. Who it is for: viewers who like films that are the conversation itself, and America at the end of 1959. Who it is not for: anyone bothered by how the women are handled. The film leans on the men's talk and mostly keeps the women as its subject.