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‘The Taste of Things,’ dir. Trần Anh Hùng

Trần Anh Hùng reunites exes Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel for a lovely movie that’s 90 percent sequences of them and their young assistants carefully preparing gourmet French dishes likely to make you salivate even if you ate something filling before starting the movie. In The Taste of Things, set in the late 1880s, the pair play Eugénie and Dodin, responsible for some of the finest dining in the world in an establishment owned by Dodin. Their partnership has lasted some 20 years; the passion imbued in their food is, for Dodin, matched in his growing love for Eugénie, who balks at the prospect of a romantic life together because she cherishes her independence on the one hand and finds her relationship with Dodin satisfying enough as is on the other. Things eventually will spill over into the sort romance Eugénie has resisted; The Taste of Things, beautifully shot by Jonathan Ricquebourg, is adept at conveying how the preparation of food for the two is akin to a love language, giving the consistent, protracted stretches of work in the kitchen a significance making them far more than the vigorous food-porn exercises than they might at first seem to be.

Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen in Fallen Leaves. Courtesy of MUBI. In The Taste of Things photo: Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel. Courtesy of IFC Films.

‘Fallen Leaves,’ dir. Aki Kaurismäki

So many romantic movies that hinge on whether its central, newly cuffed leads will remain together often throw their dramatic curveball some time after the two have been established as a couple. In Aki Kaurismäki’s characteristically dry, slow-moving Fallen Leaves, you root for a prospective pair that can barely get past the first date. They are Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), blue-collar workers just making it by in modern-day Helsinki who catch one another’s eye at a karaoke bar where they’re both too shy to sing.

It’s probably love at first sight — though a filmmaker as diametrically opposed to offering anything resembling a big statement as Kaurismäki wouldn’t have either admit as much — challenged by the shared difficulty of keeping a job (Pöysti is the type to ill-fatedly stand up for herself when caught pocketing some expired products on site) and by Holappa’s specific struggle with alcoholism, which has recently transitioned into the phase where he’s drunkenly falling asleep in public places and getting fired back to back for bottle-related mishaps. It’s not so much that Kaurismäki establishes either person as perfect for each other as he gets right the romantic excitement and sense of hope they mutually pose. Fallen Leaves celebrates not a canned happily ever after but the nervous exhilaration of giving things a chance.

Kaylee Nicole Johnson, Jannie Hampton, and Jayah Henry in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. Courtesy of A24.

‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,’ dir. Raven Jackson 

Writer-director Raven Jackson’s extraordinary feature-length debut, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, is a Bildungsroman that tells the story of its Mississippi-born and -raised heroine, Mack (played at different ages by Charleen McClure, Kaylee Nicole Johnson, and Zainab Jah), with the sort of impressionism wont to depict the small victory of catching and cutting up a fish for the first time over the use of conventional dialogue as means of illumination.

Our memories are mosaics encrusted less often with words than with sights, smells, and textures. Jackson, first a poet and photographer, lyrically reinforces as much with innumerable shots preoccupied with hands and feet, interested in what it might have felt like as the former were held by a grieving grandmother at a funeral for a woman gone too soon or as the latter were trudging down a dry dirt path to a spring of water. (The rich cinematography is by Jomo Fray.) Not everything is presented linearly in what ultimately is an elliptical film; it’s as if these were scenes dramatized based on a testimonial from Mack, instructed to recount her life story as best she can. The result is one of the year’s most evocative — and best — movies, able to find the beauty in the mundane, the profound in the small.