Some good uses of food in movies I've seen, but they won't all make you hungry.
The Turin Horse 2011
Boiled potatoes with salt washed down with a little brandy is all a couple has to eat, day after day after day. They either karate chop smash the potatoes or peel the skin with their fingernails and eat them whole.
Eat Drink Man Woman 1994
Dish after dish of the best looking Chinese cuisine you will ever see.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi 2011
This is about a small eatery in a Tokyo subway station where you pay 500 dollars for a one-of-a-kind sushi dinner, which looks worth the price if you're rich.
Groundhog Day 1993
Bill Murray can eat all the pastries he wants and never gain any weight. Sign me up for the Groundhog Day diet...
Tom Jones 1963
There's a great scene where Tom Jones eats chicken seductively with a woman he later takes to bed who he doesn't know is actually his mother. Paging Dr. Oedipus.
The Scarlet Empress 1934
A Royal banquet table loaded with food has a human skeleton as a centerpiece.
Babette's Feast 1987
"The most beautifully rendered depiction of a lavish meal ever committed to celluloid" says Epicurious.com. I agree, but the meaning behind the feast is just as good. Babette spends all her money on a lavish meal for the congregation but they try to ignore the opulent meal because it is sacrilegious. However, the general is so overwhelmed he can't stop paying compliments, and eventually the church people finally have to admit how great the food is and eat it with pleasure.
Marie Antoinette 2006
One scene is pure French pastry porn. Let them eat eclairs.
Tampopo 1985
You can't watch this without craving some noodles to slurp. We also learn something sexual to do with a fresh-squeezed lemon and some salt, and a neat trick with a raw egg.
The Gold Rush 1925
Boiled shoe leather never looked so appetizing as when Chaplin feasts on it.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom 1984
Indiana Jones, an American woman, and a young Chinese boy are disgusted by a lavish Indian feast that includes eels cooked inside a giant python, chilled monkey brains, eyeball soup and bugs. It's an offensive stereotype about food from non-western cultures, but it's also unforgettable.
Cool Hand Luke 1967
Luke eats 50 hard boiled eggs!
Five Easy Pieces 1970
You can't watch this and not want to order a BLT, without the B, L, or T.
Daisies 1966
Two nutty young women graze on a lavish banquet that sits waiting for a crowd of rich people, then they totally destroy the place with food and dishes flying everywhere.
Rosetta 1999
People eat fresh hand-held Belgian waffles from a food truck in Brussels.
Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers 1980
A great ode to the stinking rose and all the great food you can make with it.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 1975
OCD Jeanne makes a weekly menu and sticks to it... until something goes a little bit wrong in the kitchen and she flips out and stabs a guy with scissors.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 1962
Baby Jane's sister serves her a rat for lunch on a silver serving tray.
9½ Weeks 1986
Food as erotica.
The Party 1968
Peter Sellers tries to carve his little game bird at dinner but it flies up and gets skewered on the tiara of the woman across the table.
Pulp Fiction 1994
The "royale with cheese" is still just a Big Mac, whatever you call it.
The Apartment 1960
Jack Lemmon uses a tennis racquet to strain spaghetti. That's the essence of bachelor living.
Stand by Me 1986
A story about a pie eating contest ends with the crowd vomiting explosively.
American Pie 1999
A boy tries to have sex with a fresh warm apple pie.
Inglourious Basterds 2009
Some very delicious-lookin strudels have a big part in an ominous scene.
The Blues Brothers 1980
These guys seem to eat nothing but white toast, fried chicken, and a coke. The full food pyramid.
The Meaning of Life 1983
A waiter insists that an obese man eats one little after-dinner mint after an enormous meal but that's all that's needed to make him explode.
Ratatouille 2007
A rat chef in the kitchen means good eatin' for gourmet diners.
Big Night 1996
This one is full of awesome-looking food.
Oldboy 2003
After being held prisoner and eating nothing but the same dumplings for 15 years, a man is released from captivity, then finds his captors by tracking the dumplings to the restaurant they came from by his memory of their smell.
Hot Shots! 1991
Breakfast is cooked on a woman's hot stomach.
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle 2004
They finally get there and eat a whole table full of those little hamburgers.
Volver 2006
Penelope Cruz can cook for me anytime.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High 1982 |
Pizza delivered straight to the classroom. Learning about sex from bag-lunch carrots.
Sweet Movie 1974
A mad woman revolutionary, pedophile, and murderer has a boat filled with candy that she uses to seduce chidren and to kill her lovers.
National Lampoon's Animal House 1978
Food Fight!
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang 1932
The most absolutely disgusting prison food ever. No wonder they had to break out.
3 Idiots 2009
After rejecting food given them by one of their mothers because she used her rolling pin to scratch the chest eczema of her paralyzed husband, the three idiots crash a wedding and pile their plates ridiculously high with so much Indian food that my stomach was growling in envy. Then they are discovered and they don't get to eat any of the food.
Chocolat 2000
Lots of chocolate magic.
Chef 2014
That pasta dish he made looked so good I almost took my eyes of Scarlett Johansson. Almost.
Don't watch this unless you are within range of a Cuban sandwich or you'll suffer.
The Scent of Green Papaya 1993
Shredded green papaya is not the only thing that looks delicious in this film, there are lots of other great Vietnamese dishes.
Frenzy 1972
A police inspector enjoys an enormous "English" breakfast at work because his wife is taking French cooking classes and doesn't feed him enough for breakfast. Then we see him at dinner on two different evenings when she serves him food that makes him lose his appetite - fish soup with fish heads and squid or octopus tentacles, pigs feet, and quail with grapes - while he discusses a murder case with his wife. At one point, just as the inspector mentions that the killer broke the knuckles on a corpse in order to pry something out of the hand, his wife breaks a bread stick. He tells her he'd like to have normal bread in the house again.
The Lunchbox 2013
A mixup in the daily delivery of home cooked food to office workers in Mumbai starts a platonic romance through notes left in the lunchbox.
La Grande Bouffe 1973
This has lots of great-looking food and some funny food sex, but if the constant eating doesn't make you lose your appetite, the scatological humor will.
The Help 2011
Revenge is a dish best cold - in a chocolate pie - after you put poop in it.
The Martian 2015
An astronaut stranded on Mars runs out of food and eventually has to live on nothing but the potatoes he grows.
Once Upon a Time in America 1984
During the depression a horny and hungry teenage boy buys an expensive pastry and brings it to the apartment of a teenage girl who prostitutes herself. He is asked to wait for her outside. He unwraps the pastry to look at it, then licks some of the frosting and then some more and suddenly he has eaten the whole thing. When she finally comes out, he leaves.
Sabrina 1954
When Audrey Hepburn as Sabrina begins cooking school, it's hard to forget the shot of her standing holding cracked eggs in her hands because she hasn't learned yet how to crack an egg with one hand.
Call Me by Your Name 2017
A young boy has sex with a peach.
The Trip to Italy 2014
This movie will make you want to go on a luxury food tour of Italy like these guys.
Like Water for Chocolate 1992
A young woman who is forced to give up the man she loves manipulates other people though her cooking - making them sick, horny, or happy.
The Private Life of Henry VIII 1933
Charles Laughton won a best actor Oscar for playing King Henry who famously, at a lavish formal banquet, pours his beer over a whole cooked chicken, tears it apart with his bare hands, chews off the meat, then throws the bones over his shoulders, all the while ranting about the lack of manners and social refinement in society.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind 1977
Richard Dreyfus' character Roy spoons out mashed potatoes onto his dinner plate in a huge pile, then he starts sculpting them into the mountain he sees in the vision the aliens put in his mind. He breaks down crying when he realizes that what he's doing looks crazy and says "This means something. This is important."
Eraserhead 1977
When Henry meets Mary's parents, Mr. X says he has no feeling in his arm and is afraid he'll cut himself so he asks Henry to carve the tiny chickens he has cooked. When Henry sticks a carving fork into one of them its legs start moving and lots and huge amounts of blood pour out of it. The mother starts moaning and screaming and leaves the room with Mary, leaving the men to sit in silence for an uncomfortably long time. It's enough to make you become a vegetarian and never date again.
The Trip 2010
Two comedians on a paid tour of fine restaurants sample some great looking food, but the real treat are their conversations and competitions to prove who does the best impressions.
Fellini Satyricon 1969
Food has never been better used to show the disgusting decadence of the rich than at Trimalchio's Roman feast. Enormous trays are used to serve whole cooked animals, pig snouts, and eyeballs, and the garish guests use four-foot-long straws to suck an unknown liquid out of a giant glowing bubble. When a whole roasted pig that appears to have been cooked before it was gutted is carried in, Trimalchio pretends to be angry, demanding that the slave who cooked it gut it there in front of everyone. The slave cuts it open with a giant sword and instead of guts falling out of it Trimalchio proudly exclaims to his guests that it is full of thrushes, fatted hens, bird gizzards, sausage ropes, tender plucked doves, snails, livers, ham, and offal.
Pig 2021
Most of the time I didn't know whether the movie is making fun of fine dining or taking it seriously, but nevertheless there sure is a lot of great food in it.
The Menu 2022
The movie makes fun of pretentious overpriced haute cuisine, then the chef says they'll have the worst desert ever and the staff pours graham cracker crumbs all over, dresses the diners in chocolate hats and marshmallow jackets and sets fire to the restaurant, turning everyone into human s'mores.
Diner 1982
In this great use of a classic movie theater snack, a man on a date with a woman at a movie theater puts his penis through the bottom of a popcorn container. His date touches it when she reaches for some popcorn, freaks out, and runs out of the theater. But she stupidly lets him lie his way out of it.
The Beguiled 1971
After Corporal McBurney becomes dangerously violent, the women cook him a big dinner with a dish of poisonous mushrooms that kill him. The mushrooms were picked by the little girl whose beloved pet turtle was smashed by McBurney.
When Harry Met Sally 1989
Sally and Harry are eating sandwiches at a deli having a conversation about women faking orgasms. To prove her point she very loudly fakes having an orgasm then picks up a fork and eats something. A woman at a table nearby tells the waitperson "I'll have what she's having."