The Taste of Things (2023 | France | 134 minutes | Tran Ahn Hung)

Benoît Magimel is the Napoleon of French cuisine. Juliette Binoche is his cook, apprentice, and lover. Over twenty-plus years together, they’ve built an astonishing culinary and emotional partnership together at a stunning country estate. It’s the late 1800s, the Age of Escoffier is dawning, and food is serious business.

She prepares a sumptuous feast for him and his compatriots in gastronomy. He creates an ornate meal only for her. Over long hypnotic uninterrupted sequences, Tran Ahn Hung captures the care, grace, and dedication in the kitchen that transform food from simple sustenance to high art with what might be among the most alluring cooking sequences ever committed to film. The camera’s adoration of the kitchen reflects the degree to which the couple’s deep commitment appreciating the pleasures of food reigns supreme. The plot is light, the dialogue is sparse, life goes on. That’s the whole movie. C’est magnifique!

All of Us Strangers (2023 | UK | 105 minutes | Andrew Haigh)

Andrew Haigh seems to be working through familiar queer traumas in his gorgeously realized vibey ghost story. Set in a sparsely-occupied London high rise, Andrew Scott gives a fantastically mercurial turn in the central role: a lonely and damaged screenwriter revisiting unresolved issues stemming from the untimely death of his parents.

One key to untangling his knotted heart is a fledgling flirtation with one of the building’s few other residents: a shaggily alluring Paul Mescal, nursing his own aches and longings. The other is an inexplicable supernatural rift that allows him to repeatedly travel back to his childhood home and converse with his long-dead parents. The heartrending film sparkles with magic realism paired with a nonplussed British acceptance of the sudden presence of ghosts (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, rocking eighties attitudes and looks).

The film is on many levels a queer wish fulfillment but it’s easy to buy into Haigh’s premise and Scott’s luminous embodiment of a stunted gay man in his mid-forties having the conversations he’s always wanted to have with parents. While he gets the ultimate therapy sessions (and gets to kiss Paul Mescal) their conversations sink their claws into our hearts, too.

The Royal Hotel (2023 | Australia | 91 minutes | Kitty Green)

Running out of money on an Australian trip forces a pair of collegiate backpackers (Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick) into taking a job at a hellhole bar in the outback. This community of rough-edged miners continues Kitty Green’s ongoing project of depicting the utter horrors of male attention, again with Garner as the clear-eyed ever-alert lens. Over a taught ninety minutes, mundane menace lurks ever-present in plain sight. The film slowly builds tension with only the briefest and most tenuous respites. As it all builds to a head, Green goes hard and never once lets up.