Dinner and a movie: 17 films to feast on

British director Philip Barantini’s real-time restaurant drama Boiling Point amps up that stress factor by staging all its whirling action, both in the kitchen and dining spaces, in a single unbroken shot, during which time Stephen Graham’s heavily burdened head chef works himself to the point of outright collapse. It’s riveting, but you won’t leave it with any romantic daydreams of opening a restaurant yourself. There’s as much chaos, but a bit more warm respite, in Big Night, Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s glorious portrait of a bustling Italian-American eatery run by two feuding brothers in 1950s New Jersey: the film, with its jaw-dropping timpano pasta centrepiece, that teased Tucci’s later career turn as a beloved Italian gourmand.

With precious little Italian spirit, Mystic Pizza, a late-80s-set teen favourite revolving around the lovelorn waiting staff of a thoroughly all-American pizzeria in Connecticut, celebrates even fairly average pizza as a great enabler of American social life. Likewise, you wouldn’t go out of your way to eat at the eponymous fast-food establishment in cult 1997 teen comedy Good Burger, but an affection for certain inviolable staples of everyday dining underpins its frenetic gross-out humour.

There’s more outright reverence for humble junk food in Jon Favreau’s scrappy Chef, made between gargantuan blockbuster assignments for the film-maker, in which he plays an LA celebrity chef who reboots his flailing fine-dining career by opening a back-to-basics food truck instead. Cheerful and mouth-watering, it’s also pure fantasy: in the real world we’d never get shot of Gordon Ramsay that easily.

More absurdly fantastical is Mark Mylod’s luridly enjoyable The Menu, with Ralph Fiennes delicious as an exhaustingly pretentious and psychotically motivated culinary high priest whose ornate avant-garde dishes exert a range of complex punishments on his excessively moneyed customers. It’s darkly adult but only slightly less cartoonish than the Pixar favourite Ratatouille, the rodent fairytale takes the idea that anyone can be a great chef to adorably ludicrous ends.

Human high-end cheffery gets a better name in Tran Anh Hung’s rapt kitchen romance The Taste of Things (Mubi), perhaps the film most dedicated to the intricate pleasures and processes of food preparation in film history; dining comes almost as an afterthought. Such quasi-spiritual perfectionism is taken down a notch in Sandra Nettelbeck’s culinary romcom Mostly Martha, in which a rigorous German chef at a Hamburg haute-cuisine restaurant is unbuttoned in multiple senses by an Italian sous-chef who prefers looser, more sensual methods.

Martha’s food looks beyond reproach, but I’d rather eat at the loosey-goosey couscous restaurant run by a garrulous family of Tunisian migrants in Abdellatif Kechiche’s gloriously restless ensemble drama Couscous (BFI Player) – service issues, belly-dancing and all. Immigrant cuisine and entrepreneurship is also central to the 1988 British gem Soursweet (BFI Player), adapted by Ian McEwan from Timothy Mo’s novel, about a Hong Kong family starting up a successful takeaway business in 1960s England. Finally, Juzo Itami’s one-of-a-kind cult item Tampopo sees a languishing Japanese noodle cafe and its weary proprietress rejuvenated by a pair of enigmatic, deeply invested ramen rōnin. The sagging diner in La cocina should be so lucky.

All titles available to rent on multiple platforms unless specified.

Memoir of a Snail The long-awaited second feature from Oscar-winning Australian stop-motion animator Adam Elliot has deceptively cute character design in a story decidedly not for kids – about a mollusc-obsessed social misfit (below) buffeted between bereavements and abusive encounters, kept afloat by one offbeat friendship. Its litany of miseries can be overbearing, but the marvels of its craftsmanship and flashes of daft humour make it worthwhile.

Warfare Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s pummelling combat drama, based on the latter’s experiences as a US navy Seal during the Iraq war, focuses on sweat-drenched sensory detail in its near real-time study of a platoon occupying a city house in the midst of the 2006 battle of Ramadi. It’s tense and stomach-churning: shorn of political commentary but with a visceral anti-war payoff to its horrors.

The Alto Knights

Long off the boil, veteran director Barry Levinson attempts to get back on the prestige trail with this period gangster sprawl that ambitiously and rather unsuccessfully casts Robert De Niro in a dual role as real-life mid-century mob bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello – a distracting stunt that rather overwhelms the drama here.