And they don't mean popcorn

I just read some reviews of the Berlinale Film Festival. One featured subject at the festival is food films. Ten feature-length films and several shorts were shown, and I hope that I get to see some of them eventually!

In the Telegraph, author Florence Waters reviewed the centerpiece of the festival, the film Food Inc. She described it as: "an exposé documentary which criticises how the omnipotent food industry is crippling American society." (See Losing my appetite at the Berlinale Film Festival.) Writers Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma), who are in the film, and others participated in the festival event.

In the L.A.Times, I enjoyed the overall review Food-themed films at the Berlinale festival by Nathalie Jordi, who wrote about the mainly-serious and political films that make up the bulk of the choices. She added:

Three lighthearted features completed the lineup. Gianni di Gregorio's "Pranzo di Ferragosto" is an endearing comedy shot in dreamy, torpid Rome about a long-suffering protagonist whose buddies dump their mothers on him for the weekend. Min Gyu-dong's "Antique" is a murder mystery-cum-psychedelic musical set in a Korean cake shop maintained by a gay pâtissier, a child abuse victim and a boxer. I overheard one viewer disparage Joaquin Oristrell's "Dieta Mediterránea," about a Michelin-starred ménage a trois, as a "moronic sexcapade," but I preferred Oristrell's pat description of it as "a story about love, sex, family, friendship and food."

Googling around, I found quite a few other reviews of the films, though the concentration was on Food Inc.