Food & Cinema

Bradley Cooper hurls pans, yet keeps the whole film firmly in hand. Marcus Wareing designed the kitchen, many of the extras are real chefs from Michelin-starred restaurants, and the actors did all their own cooking. Expect finesse on the plate, a very short fuse and a chef chasing his next star. — Adam Jones once had two Michelin stars in Paris and wrecked it all himself. After three years of shucking oysters in New Orleans, he’s back in London to take over a hotel restaurant, pulling in cooks he once treated badly and hiring a sous-chef more talented than he’s willing to admit. Without them, there won’t be a third star.

In a kitchen drama that runs at full steam, Carly steps up from sous chef to head chef and has to give orders to a crew she worked beside as an equal until recently. Stephen Graham is back, and the first episode opens with an unbroken eleven-minute take that turns out to be only the warm-up. — It has been a few months since the night head chef Andy fell apart, and Carly, once his sous chef, has opened a restaurant of her own. Almost the whole kitchen crew has followed her there. She’s the boss now, but every one of them remembers who she was before.

Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s post-apocalyptic debut is a one-of-a-kind love story set in a crooked apartment building, where the caretakers keep ending up in the butcher’s shop on the ground floor. It’s rusty, ravenous cinema in which horror and slapstick go hand in hand. — When food runs short, nobody pays with money any more. The butcher advertises for a caretaker for his building, and one applicant after another ends up on his counter. Then a new candidate arrives, Louison, a clown without a circus, and the butcher’s daughter falls in love with him. She heads down into the sewers, where the vegetarians live. — Best Screenplay | César Awards | 1992 Best Production Design | César Awards | 1992 Best Editing | César Awards | 1992 Best Debut Film | César Awards | 1992

This feel-good film about life after retirement takes an uninhibited look at growing old in Iran. A seventy-year-old widow in Tehran invites a taxi driver back to her place, where there’s dancing, wine and everything else the country forbids, and she doesn’t ask anyone’s permission. — Mahin is seventy, and since her husband died and her family moved abroad she has lived on her own. Over afternoon tea, her friends tell her she ought to find someone. So she heads to a restaurant for pensioners, and at one of the tables sits a taxi driver. — Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Berlin International Film Festival | 2024 FIPRESCI Award | Berlin International Film Festival | 2024

Buñuel’s producer once forgot he’d invited guests to dinner, and when he told Buñuel the story, it became an Oscar-winning film that takes the bourgeoisie apart with impeccable manners. Six friends sit down at the table, and dinner is never served. — The first time six wealthy friends gather for dinner, they’ve got the wrong day. They try again, and again, and each time something stranger gets in the way, a corpse in the next room or a whole unit of soldiers. However often they sit down, nobody ever gets to eat. — Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 1973 Best Screenplay | BAFTA | 1974 Best Actress (Stéphane Audran) | BAFTA | 1974 Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film | Golden Globes | 1973

Abdellatif Kechiche gathers a whole family around a platter of fish couscous, and by the end you’ll feel you’ve been eating with them. This still underseen film about family and identity won four Césars and a Special Jury Prize at Venice, and its belly-dance scene has gone down in cinema history. — In the French Mediterranean port of Sète, Slimane, a divorced Tunisian in his sixties, buys a wrecked boat and sets out to turn it into a restaurant serving a single dish: fish couscous, which nobody makes better than his ex-wife. Rym, his current partner’s daughter, trails round the offices and banks with him to sort out the paperwork. No one in the family thinks he stands a chance. — Best Young Actor or Actress (Hafsia Herzi) | Venice Film Festival | 2007 Special Jury Prize | Venice Film Festival | 2007 FIPRESCI Prize | Venice Film Festival | 2007 Best Film | César Awards | 2008 Most Promising Actress (Hafsia Herzi) | César Awards | 2008 Best Director | César Awards | 2008 Best Original Screenplay | César Awards | 2008 FIPRESCI Prize | European Film Awards | 2008

Even at their closest, they’re still a millimetre apart. Wong Kar-Wai (“In the Mood for Love”) wrote each scene in the morning and shot it that night, all in two weeks, and his cult film became the first release from Tarantino’s label. A cop, a wig, and “California Dreamin’” playing again next door. — Every day Cop 223 buys a tin of pineapple with a 1 May expiry date, because that’s the day he has promised himself he’ll stop pining. He can’t take his eyes off a woman in a blonde wig, never guessing that she deals drugs. Cop 663 has just been dumped as well, and his ex-girlfriend leaves the keys with the snack bar next door. — Official Selection | Locarno International Film Festival | 1994 Best Picture | Hong Kong Film Awards | 1995 Best Director | Hong Kong Film Awards | 1995 Best Actor (Tony Leung) | Hong Kong Film Awards | 1995 Best Actress (Faye Wong) | Stockholm Film Festival | 1994

Lee Isaac Chung was set to quit filmmaking for a teaching job in Korea, and wrote a film about his own childhood instead, one that won Youn Yuh-jung an Oscar. It’s a tender story of a family trying to make a new country their home far from the old one, so come and eat with them. — David is seven, has a weak heart and has been told not to run. When his Korean family moves to a tiny farm in Arkansas to chase their own American dream, home turns out to be a trailer on cinder blocks in the middle of a field. Then his grandmother flies in from Korea, crafty, never short of a word and nothing like any other grandmother, and the house gets loud. — Best Supporting Actress (Youn Yuh-jung) | Oscars | 2021 Best Supporting Actress (Youn Yuh-jung) | BAFTA | 2021 Best Foreign Language Film | Golden Globes | 2021 Audience Award | Sundance Film Festival | 2020 Jury Prize | Sundance Film Festival |2020

Hirokazu Koreeda (“Shoplifters”) wrote this film after his mother died, and he admits that much of her behaviour found its way into it. It’s so spare and yet so warm that it recalls the Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu, and when it ends, you’ll want to pick up the phone and call your parents. — On a summer day, the Yokoyamas gather at the family home by the sea, as they do every year on the anniversary of their eldest son’s death. Junpei drowned saving a boy he didn’t know. The second son, Ryota, restores paintings without much success, and his parents have never warmed to his wife, a widow with a young son. And every year the mother invites the boy Junpei saved, now a grown man.