I think it’s time to forgive Diner for being a product of its time and embrace it as the coming-of-age masterpiece it truly is.

| Dec 8, 2023

Levinson never allows us to think that we know everything there is to know about these characters... Levinson doesn’t violate his characters by summing them up -- he understands that we never fully understand anybody.

| Sep 18, 2023

All in all, Diner is a worthwhile dish, certainly the best thing Leo the Lion has had to roar about in some time.

| Apr 4, 2022

A joyous comedy, celebrating a bygone era.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 9, 2021

In conventional dramatic terms, little happens in Diner, but it offers a completed vision of life, ecstatic in its recovery of forgotten pleasures, melancholy in its knowledge of how small a chance these men ever had of claiming their freedom.

| Dec 31, 2019

Diner is an absolute gem of a movie. Evocations of the American 1950 s have been filmed before, but none has provided more fidelity and warm good humor.

| Nov 12, 2018

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.

| Apr 27, 2018

Levinson's dialogue feels fresh and improvised, yet it hits its mark every time, and the performances he gets are complex and original.

| Jun 2, 2014

The film is wonderfully cast and played.

| Jun 2, 2014

For all his painstaking accuracy, Levinson has also concocted a dark and depressing period story devoid of a single person without a major problem or character flaw.

| Jun 26, 2008

A witty and biting screenplay is excellently portrayed by an ensemble, who would all soon become big stars.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 6, 2006

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.

| Jan 26, 2006

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.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 23, 2004

Movies like Diner -- fresh, well-acted and energetic American movies by new directors with the courage of their convictions -- are an endangered species.

Full Review | May 20, 2003

Barry Levinson's directorial debut from his own Oscar-nominated script remains his most perfectly realised and charming movie and is a fitting eulogy to his home town of Baltimore.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 17, 2001