Men at Lunch

Released Sep 20, 2013

1h 11m

Documentary

List

38%

13 Reviews

Tomatometer

39%

100+ Ratings

Audience Score

Filmmaker Seán Ó Cualáin traces the history of a photograph showing 11 construction workers eating lunch perched on an I-beam over Manhattan.

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Leonard Maltin

leonardmaltin.com

Few New York City photos are as familiar or evocative as the one that inspired the documentary "Men At Lunch."

Oct 4, 2013

Full Review

Inkoo Kang

Los Angeles Times

Regrettably, "Men at Lunch" obsesses over disappearing ghosts instead of the records we already have and the history we should know.

Rated: 2.5/5

Oct 3, 2013

Full Review

Miriam Bale

New York Times

The film feels meandering. Not only does it offer a jumble of ideas that aren't followed through, but it's also structured oddly.

Rated: 2/5

Sep 19, 2013

Full Review

Pat Padua

Spectrum Culture

Relies too much on blarney and not enough on the rich history of New York and photography.

Rated: 2/5

Aug 31, 2018

Full Review

Brent Simon

Shared Darkness

Men at Lunch loses sight of its lede and fumbles away viewer interest. The photo itself says more than this muddled documentary.

Rated: C-

Oct 14, 2013

Full Review

Nathalie Atkinson

National Post

Whether it merits a feature-length documentary or a slot on PBS, I'm not sure.

Apr 18, 2013

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Audience Member

too much repetition. more research, less guesswork.

Rated 2 out of 5 stars

02/11/23

Full Review

Audience Member

Men At Lunch is one of interesting documentaries I have ever watched. It's history that we all should respect.

Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars

02/13/23

Full Review

Audience Member

Loved it! Foreigners arent just foreigners they do work, are creative and they build and work their asses of as usual!

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

02/20/23

Full Review

Audience Member

http://www.clevelandmovieblog.com/2014/01/men-at-lunch-january-8th-at-cleveland.html

Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars

02/27/23

Full Review

walter m

For the record, watching a documentary try and describe New York City while watching it within the city limits is sort of odd but at least we get said descriptions in the dulcet tones of Fionnula Flanagan in the documentary "Men at Lunch." And as maddeningly vague as it is with the identities of the 11 men photographed having lunch on September 20, 1932(two definite and two more probables from Ireland) 800 feet above the ground at the construction site of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, that's not really the point here.(There is a valuable reminder here of the photographers who were also risking life and limb to get those photos, however staged they might have been.) What the documentary is really after and does so in fine form is to salute the work and lives of all of the anonymous ironworkers who still put their lives on the line everyday to build the city.(Of the two Irish workers identified, one died back in Ireland at a ripe old age, the other one not so much in New York City.) So, after the movie was over and I was walking south down Sixth Avenue, I tipped my hat towards the new One World Trade Center and all the workers there.

Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars

03/31/23

Full Review

Audience Member

By indulging (at length) the fantasies of participants who claim connections to the iconic photograph; whether by descent, or heritage, or - most tenuously - by being photographer for a current skyscraper project, the movie undermines the value it could have found by taking a different and deeper approach. Cut to half an hour this might be good filler for The History Channel.

Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars

01/12/23

Full Review

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Seán Ó Cualáin

Director

Fionnula Flanagan

Narrator

Eamonn Cualáin

Producer

Alan Maher

Executive Producer

Réamonn MacDonncha

Cinematographer

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Synopsis

Filmmaker Seán Ó Cualáin traces the history of a photograph showing 11 construction workers eating lunch perched on an I-beam over Manhattan.

Director: Seán Ó Cualáin
Producer: Alan Maher
Distributor: First Run
Genre: Documentary
Original Language: English
Release Date (Theaters): Sep 20, 2013, Limited
Release Date (Streaming): Aug 10, 2016
Box Office (Gross USA): $2.3K
Runtime: 1h 11m