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Truly Tantalizing Foodie Films
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items If you're a foodie like me, you have a special place in your heart for movies about food—particularly movies that can somehow communicate the taste, touch, and smell of food through the screen. These are some of my favorite movies about food and food...
Probably the best food-centric film of all time, it's difficult to do justice to just how delightfully offbeat this “ramen western,” about the struggle to make the perfect bowl of ramen, really is: a black comedy that satirizes the conspicuous consum...
Tampopo (1985)
Stanley Tucci directs and stars alongside Tony Shalhoub in this utterly delightful period comedy about a pair of brothers struggling to gain notice for their failing authentic Italian restaurant. Faced with the prospect of a famous visitor, they deci...timpano,” a multi-layer baked dish of pasta, meatballs, egg, and salami.
Big Night (1996)
This moving drama from Ang Lee tells the story of a Taiwanese chef who lives with his three unmarried daughters, with whom he consistently gathers for elaborately staged Sunday dinners, where they unpack their romantic triumphs and woes, against the ...
Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)
In this American remake of Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Héctor Elizondo is a retired Mexican-American chef who conjures up elaborate meals for his three adult daughters. Like its predecessor, the film features a ton of delicious-looking food...
Tortilla Soup (2001)
This acclaimed Danish movie is one of the definitive foodie films, telling the story of a Parisian refugee who comes to work as a cook for a pair of pious sisters who have inherited their dead father's parish, disrupting their austere lives (and temp...
Babette's Feast (1987)
People think of Phantom Thread (2017) as a fashion film or a holiday film, forgetting that it's also a foodie film! Food plays a central role in this dark romance, in which a relationship unfurls over a series of meals: lavish dinners out, tense brea...
Phantom Thread (2017)
People criticize this film as uneven, given its parallel structure: it follows the the culinary career of 1960s celebrity chef Julia Child (Meryl Streep, having far too much fun), and the present-day call agent-turned blogger (Amy Adams, not having e...
Julie & Julia (2009)
Sofia Coppola's visual masterpiece is a detailed documentation of the excesses of the rich and famous, including the decadent food and drink displays of the immoderate French court prior to the Revolution. This includes hundreds of gorgeous-looking p...
Marie Antoinette (2006)
A family gathers for Sunday dinners against the disruptive forces of interpersonal tragedy in the debut feature of George Tillman Jr., who based the story on his own family, and the significance that traditions— particularly food and the ritualized s...
Soul Food (1997)
Food is therapy in this Mexican film, based on the book of the same name by author Laura Esquivel, which employs magic realism to explore one woman's attempts to process her heartbreak after a man she is forbidden to marry marries her sister. The fil...
Like Water for Chocolate (1992)
As a satire of haute cuisine and fine dining culture, I think this film is a bit inert: it is extremely broad and the targets are too easy to make much of an impact. But I love the way food is photographed in it (including a particularly mouth-wateri...
The Menu (2022)
Martin Scorsese's sumptuous adaptation of Edith Wharton's iconic Gilded Age novel is a visual feast, capturing the excess, pageantry, and pretension of upper middle class life in the late 19th century. Nowhere is that more evident than the way it pre...
The Age of Innocence (1993)
Food serves an important role in the film in this drama about a Chinese-American writer who travels to Changchun, China to say goodbye to her paternal grandmother, who has been given a terminal lung cancer diagnosis: the table serving as a meeting sp...
The Farewell (2019)
In this lovely Japanese film, a failing dorayaki (a Japanese treat consisting of sweet paste sandwiched by two pancakes) shop, located on the outskirts of Tokyo, is saved by the appearance of an eclectic older woman, who brings with her a homemade be...
Sweet Bean (2015)
This atmospheric Food Truck Film tells the story of a sacked chef who tries to startover in Miami with a dilapidated food truck, finding newfound success as a traveling food truck, with stops in New Orleans and Austin. Director/star Jon Favreau broug...
Chef (2014)
This schmaltzy movie is far longer than you could possibIy imagine, and it's not going to win any awards, but it does feature a lot of truly striking food photography, thanks to the “eat” portion of the film, in which Julia Roberts freely imbibes in ...
Eat, Pray, Love (2010)
This terrific Franco-Tunisian film depicts the efforts by an immigrant man from Maghreb to open his own restaurant on a boat in Sete, France, a shipping town, and is particularly concerned with the relationship between family and food (and the immigr...
The Secret of the Grain (2007)
Ok, so it's a documentary, which does feel like a cheat. But seriously, has food ever looked better on film than it does here? This beloved film follows (then) 85-year-old sushi master Jiro Ono, who owned and ran Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seat eatery in...
Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)