Popular reviews

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  Review by Jonathan White ★★★★★ 10

  This is my third or fourth time sitting down to the table with Babette, and each tasting is more sumptuous and rewarding. After this screening, I realized that Babette deserves a perfect score.

  The story is simple, lovely, and gentle. It takes it’s time. It’s this unhurriedness that makes you fall in love, gradually and naturally. The first act is solely dedicated to back story, where we are introduced to the inhabitants of a tiny, picturesque, Danish hamlet. The close knit community revolves around a tiny sect led by a moral and just preacher. His two daughters, Martine and Filippa, are named for Martin Luther and his friend Philipp Melanchton, founders of Protestantism. The fracture with Catholicism being the notion…

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  Review by Colin Burgess ★★★★★ 1

  Like a revenge movie except instead Babette trying to murder the people that wronged her, she cooks a really nice meal for people that have been nice to her

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  Review by Jeffrey Overstreet ★★★★★ 4

  Three weeks ago, I introduced this film to 35 freshmen at Seattle Pacific, and tonight I introduce it to a gathering at Saint Ambrose Anglican Church in Seattle.

  You know, I often hear this movie summed up as a story about a "worldly" Frenchwoman who becomes a part of a bone-headedly strict religious community, and how she enlightens them.

  She does enlighten them, to some extent.

  But let's not overlook that Babette fled from a civil war in Paris in which her husband and son were shot — and who had the generosity of heart to take her in, give her refuge, and even give her a place in their home? The pious Christian sisters who preserve that strict, "prudish"…

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  Review by David Wallace Great Movie Essays ★★★★½ 6

  Moving with an almost geological slowness, Gabriel Axel begins his amorphous adaptation of the "Babette's Feast" short story by Karen Blixen (under the pen name Isak Dinesen) with an indirect, backward progression to bring the titular character into focus. This is not surprising because, although Axel directed numerous films during his lengthy career, this was the one story he waited patiently to bring to life as a motion picture, and he was intent on doing the original text justice. Over the years there has been speculation in regards to a North American remake, which one could easily envisage starting with Babette as the central protagonist living in Paris; a place that is only restored in Axel's film through the anthropomorphism…

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  Review by travis k ★★★★ 5

  A sumptuous spread of grace and mercy. Lavish blessing does not reduce faith, but magnifies it. A feast for the senses and the soul.

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  Review by Lise ★★★★★ 4

  I first saw and fell in love with Babette's Feast back in the late 80s shortly after it was released. I had just begun my foray into foreign films and Babette confirmed what would later come to be a truth so ingrained in me that it is the subject of teasing (eh Showbill?): I love foreign films. I don't love them because they are foreign, although sometimes that is enough, when my curiosity about how one lives elsewhere gets the better of me. I love them because of the stories they tell and how they tell them. Even back in the 80s I had come to expect a certain way of telling stories from North American productions, and the more…

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  Review by yarb ★★★ 26

  French cuisine must be the most overrated food in the world. I was leafing through one of our cookbooks the other day. It was "bistro" themed. The recipes were mostly offal and cabbage. Babette doesn't serve cabbage, but still I didn't find her feast especially mouthwatering. Of course the elderly Presbyterian Danes enjoy it, but they've only ever eaten bread-and-ale-soup and manky plaice. Hardly connoiseurs. Big fish in a small pond, that's Babette imo.

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  Review by Bryant Tyler ★★★★★ 15

  Babette’s Feast

  “Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.” Stella Adler

  “The sense of wonder, that is our sixth sense. And it is a natural religious sense." D. H. Lawrence

  Author Karen Blixen is most famous for her book Out of Africa (1937), written when she managed a farm in British East Africa. When she later returned to her native home of Denmark, she crafted her memoir as well as a collection of short stories. She made a bet with a friend to see if she could get a short story accepted into the American “Saturday Evening Post”. Her friend, giving her advice about how to write for the American market, suggested…

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  Review by Graham ★★★★ 2

  Achille Papin and his lusciously deep baritone timbre is a joy to behold as his voice rises and falls with his emotions. A man that falls in love easily, he puts in an engaging performance that is lovely to watch like many of the characters in this beautiful Danish film by Gabriel Axel. A smart and calming piece of cinema, Babettes gæstebud is a stunning piece of film for it's time and looks really quite different to others released in this period.

  As a simple tale of family, religion and love, with a side order of yearning hopefulness I really enjoyed this. It's my first watch, and I feel like it has much to offer on repeat viewings, so I…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★½ 1

  While Danish author Karen Blixen's best-known work remains Out of Africa, her short story Babette's Feast, initially published in 1958 as part of a collection entitled Anecdotes of Destiny, is unsurpassed in managing in reaching an intensely human nerve.  

  The anthology was the final published work put out during her lifetime, and Gabriel Axel's cinematic adaptation is a comprehensively elegant film. It's punctured with biblical allusions throughout the totality of its screentime and gradually develops into being a symbolic examination of an artist's emotional association to their craft. 

  It accounts a stringent ecclesiastical village community on the desolate western coastline of Denmark which welcomes a French refugee from the Franco-Prussian War during the late nineteenth century, as a housekeeper…

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★

  A work of carefully crafted artistry. Exquisitely captured; this refined film of fastidious beauty has power in every frame. Babette’s Feast tells the story of a small coastal village in Denmark. It’s pietistic residents have devoted their life to their pastor and their God; resigning all worldly pleasures in exchange for gracious divinity and salvation. When a mysterious French woman named Babette with a tragic past arrives there with nothing, she is taken in by the two pious daughters to the founding pastor of the village. She is treated with the utmost love, acceptance and unconditional dignity during her time as a housekeeper there. One day—after the Franco-Prussian war has ended—Babette discovers that she has won the lottery; a sum of ten…

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  Review by abby ★★★★½ 13

  while nickelodeon and disney channel definitely had shows i loved, my favorite television channel when I was younger had to be the food network. it began my love for cooking with it’s many competition series. my all-time favorite had to be cutthroat kitchen. cutthroat kitchen’s concept was incredible to me at the time and still is to this day: four chefs are given $25,000 at the beginning of the show to participate in an auction for items that can be used to sabotage their competitors. after three rounds, the winner was able to keep the amount of money they had remaining. genius. it’s execution has a self-awareness that is prevalent in all of my favorite reality shows . on cutthroat…