2025 DINNER & A MOVIE SERIES

Join us on a cinematic and culinary adventure as Rialto Cinemas owner Ky Boyd and chef and author Michele Anna Jordan combine their expertise to take diners on six unique cinematic celebrations in 2025.

Victor/Victoria
Directed by Blake Edwards
Rated PG, 143 minutes
Dinner: A savory gougére starts this classic French meal, with cream of mustard soup topped with brown butter scallops, roast chicken with beurre rouge, wild rice, and roasted asparagus, butter lettuce salad, and thin-crusted apple tart sending you off to enjoy the film.
Film: Victoria Grant (Julie Andrews), a down-and-out British soprano, struggles to find work in the nightclubs of 1930s Paris. While trying to scam a free meal, Grant meets cabaret performer Toddy (Robert Preston), who comes up with an idea that will change everything. Acting as her manager, Toddy bills Grant as a male female impersonator. When the nightclubs eat it up, the duo makes it big — even a Chicago mobster (James Garner) is enamored with Grant. But keeping the truth a secret is no easy task. Written and directed by Blake Edwards, this musical gender-bender is sharp, funny and all-round entertaining.

Tampopo
Directed by Jûzô Itami
Not Rated, 124 minutes
Dinner: Japanese flavors and textures in everything from fresh pickles and skewers of rare beef to oodles of noodles and more shape this menu. Dessert? Green Tea Ice Cream, of course, but with a surprise or two.
Film: The tale of an eccentric band of culinary ronin who guide the widow of a noodle-shop owner on her quest for the perfect recipe, this rapturous “ramen western” by Japanese director Juzo Itami is an entertaining, genre-bending adventure underpinned by a deft satire of the way social conventions distort the most natural of human urges—our appetites. Interspersing the efforts of Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto) and friends to make her café a success with the erotic exploits of a gastronome gangster and glimpses of food culture both high and low, the sweet, sexy, and surreal Tampopo is a lavishly inclusive paean to the sensual joys of nourishment, and one of the most mouthwatering examples of food on film ever made.

Les Blank Collection
Directed by Les Blank
Not Rated, 127 minutes
Dinner: Expect copious amounts of garlic, mudbugs, red beans, dirty rice, bread pudding & more to shape this tribute to the delicious foods of New Orleans, chronicled by one of America’s greatest documentary filmmakers.
Film: Three Les Blank films comprise this dinner.. Always For Pleasure (1978): Blank’s raucous tribute to the sights, sounds, and flavors of New Orleans is perhaps his most sustained representation of pure joy. Yum, Yum, Yum! A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking (1990): Les Blank marries his passion for spicy, down home food and his love for Cajuns and Creoles in this mouth-watering, exploration of the cooking, and other enthusiasms, of French-speaking Louisiana. Features tangy music, and food by Marc Savoy, Paul Prudhomme, and other greats. Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980): As a result of a lost bet with his assistant, Errol Morris, director Werner Herzog must eat his own shoe.

The Lunch Box
Directed by Ritesh Batra
Rated PG, 124 minutes
Dinner: Indian meals are defined, in part, by a constellation of condiments that transport a meal from good to extraordinary. You’ll enjoy three chutneys, three raitas, coconut, raisins, and peanuts, and sip Michele’s handmade chai as you tuck into dal (soup), curry, rice, stuffed bananas, and more.
Film: Lonely housewife Ila (Nimrat Kaur) decides to try adding some spice to her stale marriage by preparing a special lunch for her neglectful husband. Unfortunately, the delivery goes astray and winds up in the hands of Saajan (Irrfan Khan), an irritable widower. Curious about her husband’s lack of response, Ila adds a note to the next day’s lunchbox, and thus begins an unusual friendship in which Saajan and Ila can talk about their joys and sorrows without ever meeting in person.

Babette’s Feast
Directed by Gabriel Axel
Rated G, 114 minutes
Dinner: Our pre-movie dinner is inspired by the film’s indulgent meal, with vichyssoise topped with a poached quail’s egg, buckwheat crepes & tiny potatoes with American golden caviar, quail & chicken liver mousse in a puff-pasty nest, haricots verts, and a very French dessert. What to drink? It’s your choice, from among recommended selections at our no-host bar. But Babette would want you to have red wine.
Film: At once a rousing paean to artistic creation, a delicate evocation of divine grace, and the ultimate film about food, the Oscar-winning Babette’s Feast is a deeply beloved treasure of cinema. Directed by Gabriel Axel and adapted from a story by Isak Dinesen, it is the lovingly layered tale of a French housekeeper with a mysterious past who brings quiet revolution in the form of one exquisite meal to a circle of starkly pious villagers in late nineteenth-century Denmark. Babette’s Feast combines earthiness and reverence in an indescribably moving depiction of sensual pleasure that goes to your head like fine champagne.

What’s Cooking?
Directed by Gurinder Chadha
Rated PG-13, 119 minutes
Dinner: The main course of this multi-cultural nod to our November holiday is the extravaganza known as pozole, made with both pork and turkey, of course. Turkey picadillo, green papaya salad, purple sweet potatoes, stuffed chiles with corn salsa, mac’n cheese with greens and chorizo, and warm pear gingerbread are on the menu, too.
Film: In Gurinder Chadha’s What’s Cooking, you are invited to a tasty Thanksgiving dinner that will all at once transport you to four different worlds and take you home again. On the menu this November are turkey, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie — but also tamales, spring rolls, kugel, mac & cheese, love, betrayal, sibling rivalry, prejudice, politics, uninvited guests, unexpected accidents, outrageous conversations — and all the other succulent and spicy surprises that arise when modern families come together for an annual meal.