10 OF THE BEST
Dairy product perfection
The greatest cinematic cheeses, fromage to you.
01 LADY BIRD
Saoirse Ronan’s titular teen may have immature ideas about the East Coast and life, but she has one thing right: the balm of eating an entire cheddar with your bestie when things don’t go to plan. They used vegan cheese cos Beanie Feldstein is allergic to dairy.
02 FRENCH KISS
Meg Ryan’s romantic kook is lactose-intolerant but seduced by fromage on a train from Paris to Cannes with Kevin Kline’s thief. “Oh, God, the mucus is here…” she belches of the impending fallout having crammed many of France’s 452 official cheeses in her gob.
03 WALLACE & GROMIT: A GRAND DAY OUT
The turophile friends build a rocket to fire them to the moon for the ultimate picnic. They pack crackers but no breathing apparatus to enjoy a lunar delicacy. “Tastes like no cheese I’ve ever tasted,” muses Wallace.
04 MOUSEHUNT
Two foolish brothers (Nathan Lane and Lee Evans) go to war against a mouse but call a truce when the little fella invents cheese string in their dad’s string factory. Creating flavours such as curry, herring and mozzarella and caviar/brie swirl, they make a mint.
05 BURN AFTER READING
“Is that goat?” Harry (George Clooney) asks his lover’s hubby (John Malkovich) when offered hors d’oeuvres at a house party. Tweaky, defensive and aggressively chewing, it’s a masterclass in creating character with a chevre crispbread.
06 RATATOUILLE
Epicurean rat Remy knows great flavours – his education stems from being introduced to the taste explosion of eating a piece of cheese and a strawberry together – create palate fireworks. So visceral that a piece of brie is required when watching.
07 PULP FICTION
“It’s the little differences,” says John Travolta’s hitman Vincent to Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules while they compare Europe and America in the car. The cheese sells the point. In Paris, he informs his bud, a quarter pounder is called a ‘Royale with cheese’. Ooh la la!
08 MOTHER
John’s (Albert Brooks) irritating, controlling mum (Debbie Reynolds) insists on freezing everything. “You want some cheese?” she demands, hoiking a boulder-sized, threeyear-old block of frozen Swiss out of the cooler. It weighs “as much as a Fiat”, he declines.
09 CHEF
Jon Favreau’s film about a food-truck chef is pure food porn, but the sequence where he lovingly preps a humble grilled cheese sandwich might be cheese heaven. Oh lord, the butter… Rivalled only by Harley Quinn’s dirty bacon bap from Birds Of Prey.
10 DIARY OF A WIMPY KID
A slice of sandwich cheese languishes on the schoolyard floor creating the dreaded crowd-dispersing ‘cheese touch’. It’s worse than ‘nuclear cooties’ and can only be expunged by transference to other kids. Like tag with curds. JC