Starters: "What Men Talk About" (2023)

This series of films is hard to retell, because each time the main characters end up doing absolutely nothing for two hours in a row, and yet you follow them and cannot look away. 

This time, the friends' symbolic journey is confined to the borders of the Garden Ring Avenue in central Moscow. They are taking this three-hour-long stroll to help Sasha clear his mind and make a fateful decision... Which, as it eventually turns out, has little to do with the problem he is complaining about.

All along the road, the four leads are trading good-natured jabs, reminiscing about their youth, spitting a hundred aphorisms a second... and consuming most appetizing snacks. Each of their mini-lectures on eating (and drinking), be it about another fictional defloppet or a next-door kvass, is a piece of art.

Main course: "The Hundred-Foot Journey" (2014)

This movie has everything we love about cinema: superb food filmed from all angles, a culture clash, a peek into the life of foreign countries where our sister-cities are located...

How can it be otherwise, if the whole plot is based on the rivalry between a prim-and-proper French restaurant and a rambunctious Indian cafe daringly opened just on the other side of the road?

While the owners of both establishments are busy rivaling the famous Montagues and Capulets, the younger generation, as usual, is curious about the new neighbors and not at all averse to a closer look at their lifestyle.

We would especially recommend this movie as an inspirational background against which to run your own kitchen chores. It can be most motivational for trying new recipes and decorations.

Dessert: "Chocolat" (2000)

When one really loves his job, his hands create real magic that can potentially transform everything around them.

This is exactly how Vianne, who is very much like a French and easy-going Mary Poppins, treats her confectionery business: she, too, comes and goes with the wind; she, too, is famous for her ability to intricately solve other people's problems and is never afraid of difficult tasks. Well, starting up a chocolate shop in a small and very religious provincial town right on the eve of Lent is a task that's not just difficult, but downright hopeless!

Moreover, the child she look after is her own and not the easiest one to deal with. And the problems that her customers have to face are absolutely not the ones for school reading.

The arts of cooking sweets and decorating shop windows are depicted in the film with the greatest love and attention to detail, and when Vianne boilshot chocolate, the process looks nothing short of a sacred ritual.

Photo: Kinopoisk