'The Hundred-Foot Journey' was a little like 'Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' for me - I had quite low expectations as I thought it was going to be an "old lady movie". Thankfully, I was proven wrong and instead was treated to a nice little film about following your dreams.The premise is simple - an Indian family move to London, get sick of the cold/rain (who wouldn't!) and travel to continental Europe to find a new place to settle and start a restaurant. This place happens to be a picturesque little village in Southern France - however, their new restaurant happens to be next to a Michelin-rated French restaurant, and a rivalry ensues.The performances from Puri as the Dad and Mirren as the French restaurant owner are great and quite nuanced, with Hassan (Daval) and Marguerite (the huge-eyed Le Bon) playing the young love interests/competing chefs. It's great to see how their friendship evolves as Hassan goes on his food journey. Some parts of this feel like a cooking show, but not enough to put you off. It has funny moments, touching moments and a nice ending - plenty of messages about openness and accepting other cultures, and generally giving something/someone a chance.

I'm upset with myself that I took so long to getting around to watching this film. I just finished it, and it is wonderful, on all levels. It is a wonderful human story featuring great actors and fantastic-looking food. Everything which needs to be said about this film has already been written, so I'll just say Watch It!

This movie is the gem of all spices. Sweet, sour, spicy and bitter, i thas everything and yet it blends it so well, stirs it so good, creating flavor out of thin air, encasing wisdom where none may dwell. The scenes are beautifully lit, the landscape is gorgeously depicted into a Turkish delight for your eyes, you get a sense of art and yet its moving and thrilling. The director thought to follow a different line than the one usually depicted as "generic" and obtained something so valuable yet uniquely so, appetizing. You can literally taste this movie, each moment and sip it as if you'd enjoy a sparkling wine along side a full course meal. The protagonist is your ideal person, unchained by arrogance yet bound by desire and hope, he is able to forge his path in the midst of strife yet unyielding and committed even in peril and adversity. The two parents are an idiom of experiences and memories, bringing together the generation and cultural gap of two different eras. Their families aren't just there for support and to offer doubt or confidence, but they act, they live and breath as if they were real. The whole village-town scene, the market, coffee shops, town hall and so forth, is the proof of "union cuisine", merging two different styles and cultures into one, creating a new history and a new culture. A symbiosis with no equal, this is the true 3 star of this movie. I highly recommend it. Regards, Syrus G

(Spoilers) This is a sumptuous banquet of beautiful locations, good acting, a lovely soundtrack by the legendary A.R. Rahman, and it plays out more-or-less the way you would expect and want it to. The actors know exactly what they are doing, particularly Helen Mirren and Om Puri, who both start out bombastic and brutal but let their guards down convincingly.However, as some people have noted, the most surprising thing in 'Hundred-Foot Journey' is its very great resemblance to the 2007 animation 'Ratatouille', with many themes, scenes and even one or two lines bearing an uncanny resemblance. For example, Hassan is basically a composite of Ratatouille's two main characters, awkwardly falling in love with the rival female sous-chef while also becoming a rising star of the kitchen with his unorthodox cooking style, delivering a dish for a critic which is vital to preserving their good rating. On a personal level, the scene where Hassan tastes the sea urchin in the market in India is very similar to Remy's tasting of the various cheeses, both finding a moment of clarity and epiphany, suddenly knowing for sure that their destiny lies with food.Other themes too, such as outsiders feeling they should never mix in each other's worlds, then discovering and accepting the advantages of integration, are present in both films. (It is perhaps possible that the writer of Ratatouille wanted to explore immigration, integration and racism metaphorically, whereas Hundred-foot was more willing to deal with it directly.)While many children's films are adapted from serious grown-up works, it is downright bizarre to see this happening in the other direction. It isn't a bad thing though, Ratatouille is good and worthy of influencing others.(And before anyone mentions it, the novel that 'Hundred-Foot' was based on was published in 2010, three years after Ratatouille's release in 2007, so Ratatouille definitely came first.)On the downside, though they're not carbon copies, it is very hard to shake the feeling that this is a live-action remake, and consequently anyone who has watched Ratatouille is going to find very few surprises or twists in Hundred-foot.