Best Movies About Food
Movies usually conjure up images of popcorn, candy, and soda, but sometimes you’re in the mood for more than junk food. Sometimes you want a film to feature delectable dishes look as beautiful as the movie stars. So if you’re starving for a movie that will make you feel hungry, here are a few of the best movies that center around food.
Tampopo (1985)
Dubbed as a ramen western, Tampopo is the surprising film that makes food look delicious, silly, sensual and transcendent. The central plot involves two truck drivers trying to help a woman with her struggling ramen restaurant, but there are pleasing and odd asides. There’s a woman who rises from the dead to cook her family a final meal. A clerk tries to deal with a customer who won’t stop squeezing the food. A well-dressed couple engages in the strangest sex with an egg. And you won’t even believe the alternative method the restaurant uses for dealing with choking customers.
Ratatouille
Only in animation would you believe a rat could cook. But Remi is a mouse that loves food so much he can’t resist the urge to drop by France’s most beloved restaurant and give the kitchen a go. Only with the aid of a novice human chef can he make his mark, even if he won’t get credit for his creation. Pixar’s animation team makes every dish look superb and tantalizing, almost surreal in how delicious computer-generated food can appear.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Jiro loves his sushi restaurant. No, he REALLY loves it. So much so that it has overtaken his life in nearly every aspect, trying to nail down the perfect atmosphere, recipe, preparation, and serving of one of Japan’s most iconic dishes. His strive for perfection makes him the toughest of sushi chefs and a lot for his son to live up to. This documentary portrays sushi as more than just a pint-sized meal; it’s literally serious business.
Big Night
Immigrant brothers Primo (Tony Shalhoub) and Secondo (Stanley Tucci) struggle to keep their Italian restaurant afloat and risk everything on one dinner service for a big celebrity. This is a fascinating character drama, but also features some of the best “food porn” you’ll see in a movie, as when the movie will stop so we can watch a beautiful baked fish dish sliced. It is a quintessential film to make the mind full and the mouthwatering.
Eat Drink Man Woman
Meals become the inspiration in this film about an old chef and his three grown-up daughters that find strength in their Sunday dinners. It’s a surprising and sweet tale of romance and relationships between these women and their dad, but also a celebration of how food can bring families together. The characters, writing, and chemistry in the film are as delicious as the decadent meals served up for the screen.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
A genius inventor, Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader), knocks a remote island of sardines out of its doldrums with a device that can make any food rain down from the skies. Soon the town has burgers, spaghetti and ice cream in the forecast. As the food becomes more unstable and large, the animated film finds all sorts of fun stuff to do with the enlarged edibles, from tornadoes of spaghetti to blizzards of ice cream. For a movie based on a short children’s book, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs finds a lot of fun to be had in playing with your food.
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters
A collective of fast food products serves as the central characters in this nonsensical animated farce. Master Shake, Frylock, and Meatwad attempt to discover their origins for how they came to be if they can stop being distracted by the constant annoyance of aliens, robots, and evil scientists. While the film doesn’t feature any food that isn’t speaking, it’s hilariously written and chaotically directed that the deliciousness is subconscious. Case in point, I took my wife on our first date to this film, and she had an immediate hankering for fast food. Would it surprise you to know that isn’t the only animated film about talking food on this list? Read on.
Sausage Party
A darkly comedic allegory for religion, Seth Rogen’s raunchy animated film finds the food products of a supermarket discovering the horrible truth about what happens when they leave. If you thought it was surreal watching a film where food speaks in vulgarities, imagine how oddly silly it is to watch to watch those characters suffer horrible deaths. Hot dogs are sliced open, baby carrots are chomped, and jars of guacamole are shattered, all with them screaming in horrible pain with cartoonish features.
