Couscous.

"If you crossed Ken Loach with Robert Guédiguian, added a pinch of wry comedy and handed it to a thoroughly committed ensemble of actors, the result would be something like Couscous," suggests Anthony Quinn in the Independent.

For the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, Abdellatif Kechiche's latest, La Graine et le Mulet, known elsewhere as The Secret of the Grain, is "a deeply involving tragicomedy, combining warmth with an unexpected level of complexity, and delivering a fiercely unsentimental commentary on the sexual politics of family and food. Some critics have complained that Kechiche's scenes of family life ramble on too long, yet for me they have the easygoing, directionless quality of real life; they radiate charm and authenticity. Without them, the drama would mean far less."

Updated through 6/22.

"The winner of three awards at the Venice film festival, it has attracted sizeable audiences and been hailed not only as a cinematic masterpiece, but as an important contribution to debates about the roles and visibility of immigrant communities in national life," notes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu. "[I]t conveys, in a manner that is sensual as well as documentary, a profound understanding of both the fragility and the ferocious will-to-endure that lies - that has to - at the heart of many ethnic communities."

"The performances, too, developed in extensive workshops, are superb, with two standouts," writes Wally Hammond in Time Out. "The first is [Habib] Boufares, who is particularly touching and impressive as a prideful man coping in his own way with dislocation, disappointment and redundancy. The other is Hafsia Herzi as his 'adopted' daughter, whose bolder, more street-wise manner belies an equal, if different, second-generation immigrant's vulnerability to the problems of cultural assimilation."

"This is an extraordinary mosaic of a certain aspect of French life - which probably mirrors part of British life, too," writes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "What happens to this Franco-Arabic family has both a particular and a universal significance. And it is put on the screen with care, humanity and a total lack of forced sentimentality."

Earlier: Ginette Vincendeau in Sight & Sound and reviews from Venice.

Update, 6/22: Philip French opens his review in the Observer with a brief overview of what a history of food in the cinema might look like. Then: "[T]his movie about exile, loneliness, the nature of families, self-respect and the pursuit of dreams encompasses comedy and tragedy with understanding, compassion and a total absence of sentimentality."

Posted by dwhudson at June 20, 2008 5:25 AM