<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" People who can&amp;#039;t get enough of TV gastro-clowns like Emeril &amp;quot;Bam!&amp;quot; Lagasse, Rachel &amp;quot;E.V.O.O.&amp;quot; Ray, and Gordon &amp;quot;F-Word&amp;quot; Ramsay are obviously not getting out of the house much to dine. Those shows are so contrived, so unenlightening, and so grating I&amp;#039;d watch a rerun of Meerkat Manor. Forget television -- what I really prefer is a great movie about pleasures of food and wine, then grab some good food and wine afterward. Luckily, there are some wonderful food- and wine-related films that tell us more about the seductive interplay of food and wine, cooking and canoodling, elation and exhaustion than some pumped-up TV chef screaming into the camera. Here are six of the best.  The breathtaking Penelope Cruz plays a brilliant Brazilian cook named Isabella -- clearly the prototype for cleavage-popping TV chefs like Giada De Laurentiis -- who cooks with such sensuality and abundant chilies that she trails an aroma that renders all men on two continents insensibly in love with her. This hilarious fantasy by director Fina Torres is one of the most joyous proofs that, as Isabella, says, &amp;quot;The secret ingredient in cooking is sharing it with someone you love.&amp;quot; The bossa nova music is a big part of the mix, and the scenes of Bahia are gorgeous.   A German film about a beautiful workaholic haute cuisine chef (Martina Gedeck) whose perfectionism is a shield against intimacy, until she is forced to take in and cope with her late sister&amp;#039;s angry daughter and to compete with the highly emotional, operatic charms of a new Italian cook (Sergio Castellitto). Admirably remade as No Reservations this year with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart, which is almost as good.  One of the sweetest films of brotherly love ever made, with Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci as the owners of a 1950s New Jersey restaurant on the brink of disaster because the demanding chef Shalhoub refuses to cook insipid Italian-American food for undiscerning customers. The feast they prepare for no-show star Louis Prima is as overblown and sexy as a Fellini-esque orgy, complete with the voluptuous Minnie Driver and Isabella Rossellini at the table, and the last kitchen redemptive scene, played without words between the two brothers, is as beautiful as anything made in the Silent Era of film.   Yet another Latin-American fantasy, this film tells a series of erotic stories built around recipes. The heroine is Tita de la Garza (Lumi Gavazos), whose exquisite cooking causes all sorts of passions and emotions to collide within a Mexican ranch family. The climax comes when Tita and her lover bring so much heat to the bedrooms that a fire literally consumes them and the ranch, leaving behind in the ashes only her cookbook. The double meaning of the title refers to sexual arousal, as when boiling water is poured onto chocolate.   Though seemingly a French movie, this is actually an American film shot in Burgundy and directed by Swedish-born Lasse Hallstr\u00F6m, starring Juliette Binoche as a mysterious unmarried mother and artisanal chocolatier arriving in a very conservative French village, with Johnny Depp as a river gypsy, Judi Dench as an embittered old woman, and Alfred Molina as a rigorously religious mayor -- all of whom are seduced and changed by the taste of Binoche&amp;#039;s remarkable chocolates. There&amp;#039;s also a mouthwatering scene of a bourgeois backyard roast chicken dinner, and of the debauchery of wallowing in chocolate bliss.   A small, completely beguiling film about a Latino L.A. family whose widowed father and master chef (Hector Elizondo) tries to prevent his three daughters from leaving him for husbands, while he himself tries as hard to keep love at bay and to avoid a brassy, pushy woman played with engaging vulgarity by Raquel Welch. The youngest daughter, Carmen (Jacqueline Obradors), cooks with her father in beautiful scenes of closeness and breaking away. The movie is a remake of Ang Lee&amp;#039;s Eat Drink Man Woman, but I find the Latino style much more affecting. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/a3625/mariani101707/>