Elissa Suh
(She/Her)
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i write about film and food | @mubi @screenslate @eater @bonappetit @lithub @bombmagazine @voguemagazine @filmmakermag @archdigest @anothergaze @tmagazine
Articles by Elissa Suh
Awkwafina Had Zero Culinary Skills, But Her New Show Changed That Original
In her pristine Los Angeles kitchen, Nora Lum—the actor, comedian, and rapper better known as Awkwafina—is standing over a stove with two burners and losing the fight with both. Ramen boils on one; Spam violently sizzles over the other. Surveying the spectacle over FaceTime, her nonagenarian grandmother Powah cackles and tells her (lovingly) that it looks like shit. This scene opens Lum’s new show, Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook. “Food is so important to being Asian,” she announces to the camera.
Virginie Efira on the Quiet Splendors of Festival-Season Favorite All of a Sudden
In All of a Sudden, the latest film from Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car), Virginie Efira stars as Marie-Lou, the director of an eldercare home that practices Humanitude, an unconventional philosophy of care centered on empathy and attentiveness to residents—sometimes at the expense of efficiency. The story is set in motion when Marie-Lou meets Mari, a Japanese theater director played by Tao Okamoto, and a tentative friendship forms.
FALL MOVIE GUIDE / NYFF cheat sheet
What to wait for and what to skip. I missed the New York premiere of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's Elizabeth Holmes doc because I was on assignment in Detroit. Luckily, it comes out in just two weeks, I’m certain the buzz will stay intact. That's the thing about NYFF: compared to Toronto, where I previously was (a real mishap; full report for a new outlet reaaaal soon) it's a tighter festival that is unconcerned with launches and red carpets and focused on surveying the year in cinema.
Short takes #11 / better if not best
From where I stand, 2026 has been pretty mid-year for movies. The lackluster showing at Cannes signaled as much.
My 6 favorite concert scenes in movies
I've been seeing this clip of a young Matt Damon, bald, pierced, and lip-syncing into a mic, make its way around the internet post-Odyssey. It is, of course, a scene from EuroTrip, which I'm certain I didn't watch upon release in 2004 but somehow already knew the song about Fiona’s misdeeds and Scotty the teenage cuck.
Shatara Michelle Ford and Dylan Meyer on Remaking Genre Movies in Their Own Image
When I tell filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford that I don’t want to pin down Dreams in Nightmares, their elegiac sophomore feature, explicitly as a “road movie”—that it feels too slippery, too much its own thing, to sit neatly inside a genre built on decades of lone men and empty highways—they stop me, considerately. “I appreciate you not wanting to put it in a genre bucket,” they say. “But the whole thing that I do is a revisionist exercise with all things. So this is a revisionist road movie.
Last month, my friend and fellow critic Clara Cuccaro and I saw the new movie Tony. We both wanted to review it properly somewhere, but as non-staff critics, neither of us could get a bite, which itself felt telling: a lot of our usual outlets were passing on this one entirely because it seemingly wasn’t worth the space. That should tell you something before you read another word.
Hugh Jackman murders a man for bread in the new Robin Hood
It is high summer, and I’m trying to extract pleasure from every available hour. Today: a guest essay from writer Abe Beame—of GQ, Complex, SB Nation, Brooklyn Magazine. He talks to Michael Sarnoski, whose latest film, The Death of Robin Hood, is now available to stream. If you’re headed to the movies this week… Thank God for Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who appears to be on an absolute heater. THE SAMURAI AND THE PRISONER (which calls back to Serpent’s Path) is a period piece that’s anything but dusty.
I wrote a book about sexy movies
Recapping some personal news: I curated and co-edited a book for A24! I spent the better part of last year with Veronica Fitzpatrick (film professor, writer, and a kindred spirit) watching any one and new(to us) movies that had even the faintest whiff of erotic potential. Sex is subjective, and we found that defining and separating the romantic from the lascivious was a… most titillating exercise. Our aim was not necessarily to be academic, educational, or historical.
Movie Rx: Emily North of Angelcake
This is kind of like Cinema Hotline, but with a single patient. I’ll be recommending films the way a slightly overinvested friend would, because really that’s what I am! Someone who has been quietly tracking my friends’ viewing habits through their offhand comment and notes and stories, with a specificity that feels almost medically relevant. If you’re a paid subscriber, DM me to get yours. First up is emily north who writes angelcake.
On the empty provocations of The Drama
When it hits 100 degrees, naengmyun is the one correct meal. Maybe it’ll even come out of a slushy machine. Speaking of noodles: I caught up with Lucio Castro’s Drunken Noodles, a small, lovely thing, at IFC. They’re also playing the new Mary Oliver doc. If you want a July 4th movie, I’d go with an experimental Western at Anthology, or my perennial pick: De Palma’s Blow Outat momi, but also blessedly available on Tubi. Veronica and I talked about our A24 book and sexy movies with Vanity Fair.
What They're Having: John Early
All my friends are in Paris, and I'm almost jealous. Almost. I'm in New York, spending my summer weekends chasing the enigmatic Roll-O Dairy Bar around the tri-state area—not on assignment, just out of genuine obsession. I love its cheeky rules, its studied mix of high and low. It feels spiritually adjacent to Superiority Burger (the two are even collaborating on a few events this summer). There are worse ways to spend July.
What They’re Having: Mon Petit Canard
Before I get to today’s interview, a few of my own that have been recently published. Morgan Spector, aka Train Daddy, has been doing the rounds of press, and I lightly profiled him for the Hamptons issue of CULTURED. I won’t bait you with the photos by Jeremy Liebman, which are incredibly hot. It’s the 30th anniversary of I Shot Andy Warhol,soI talked to its director Mary Harron for Filmmaker Magazine. She’s best known for American Psycho.
Elliot Tuttle wants sex in movies to feel dangerous again
The title is a reference to pornographic films and also calls to mind Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie, which also contains explicit adult material, not to mention Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993). In a summer filled with films about sex, Blue Film stands easily as the most provocative. Elliot Tuttle’s featureopens on Alex AKA Aaron Eagle (Kieron Moore), a 20-something berating an online audience of horny submissives for the money they’ve scraped together to spend on him.
I Shot I Shot Andy Warhol
Back to selection by Elissa Suh in Directors, Interviews on Jun 15, 2026 I Shot Andy Warhol, Lili Taylor, Mary Harron, SCUM Manifesto, The Factory, Valerie Solanas Before she brought the charismatic serial killer Patrick Bateman to life in American Psycho (2000) Mary Harron devised a portrait of another kind of New York pathology with I Shot Andy Warhol (1996).
What They’re Having: Brooke Callahan
An unusual and particularly mischievous week for me: a beverage summit hosted by Oatly, the Screen Slate Gala, and Prada Mode, where Nicolas Winding Refn and Hideo Kojima held forth on life, death, and clubbing with guests like Michael Musto and Amanda Gorman. The whole thing was an all-day odyssey in the Chelsea Hotel that deserves its own post (forthcoming, I promise). In other words: I am spent. So today we’re kicking off a new summer interview series about what else but movies and food.
Late reviews 2026
Adapted from Virginia Feito’s novel, VICTORIAN PSYCHO is a darkly frosted confection about a death-haunted governess of dubious origins (Maika Monroe) who arrives at a new place of work at a new country estate carrying more than a few secrets.
CINEMA HOTLINE: What should I watch on the plane?
Turn off your phone, maybe your brain. With special guests Fran Hoepfner and Veronica Fitzpatrick. I’m not at Cannes, but I did catch Victorian Psycho and Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, and enjoyed them both, which are much more irreverent than the trailers reveal. Schoenbrun’s film is ironically a little too trapped its own intellectual frameworks to fully loosen up, but I think that’s also part of the point.
Leo Woodall Is Cracking On
Tuner is Leo Woodall’s first leading movie role—and something of a pivot. Known for playing men defined by their inscrutability—Jack in The White Lotus; the boyish object of Rachel Weisz’s desire in Vladimir—he’s still guarded here, but newly exposed.
A chaotic and completely accurate ranking of Noah Baumbach movies
It is my birthday week, which I have spent doing exactly what I want. Apparently, what I want is to give you this. Noah Baumbach is one of my favorite directors. I know how that sounds. For a while, claiming him as a favorite felt defensible and incriminating, like admitting Jonathan Franzen is your favorite novelist. I actually do like Franzen, but that’s for another issue. Baumbach makes a cinema of discomfiture that doesn’t age out.
SHORT TAKES / Buffet Infinity
These are not the huge loaves I mention in La maison des Bois, but you will know it when you see it. It’s my season, astrologically speaking—I think. With my birthday two weeks out, I’m en route to Mexico City, where a woman in a hot-pink bunny suit sped past at the airport: “This is so East Coast. I’m scared.” It’s also baseball season, and as reading material, I have Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, which has been on my list, really, since it came out, and A.M. Gittlitz’s new book on the Mets.
Mad Bills to Pay is your new favorite NY movie
Would you pass the marshmallow test? I’m very much the kind of person who holds off on the final chapters of a book or episodes of a television show to prolong the pleasure of having it still ahead. At least that’s what I tell myself, and so it is with the latest issue of MUBI Notebook, which happens to be centered on food and film—not incidentally one of the founding preoccupations of this newsletter. I’ve had it for months, and I still have one or two essays deliberately unread.
Mad Bills to Pay is your new favorite NY movie
Would you pass the marshmallow test? I’m very much the kind of person who holds off on the final chapters of a book or episodes of a television show to prolong the pleasure of having it still ahead. At least that’s what I tell myself, and so it is with the latest issue of MUBI Notebook, which happens to be centered on food and film—not incidentally one of the founding preoccupations of this newsletter. I’ve had it for months, and I still have one or two essays deliberately unread.
NEW MOVIES / NEW COFFEE SHOPS
Last week, seemingly everyone else in NYC and I visited the newly opened Canyon Coffee. Standing in line, deeply hungover (you can thank Oddball bar for that), I ran into five different people I knew. If I seemed some measure of dazed or evasive, or like a raccoon fresh off a night of digging through the trash, consider this a formal apology. I was eventually revived by a fresh piece of toast puddled with almond butter from a California brand I’ve never heard of.
More Heart Than a Midnight Movie: Oscar Boyson and Ricky Camilleri on Our Hero, Balthazar
“It was important to us not to be a shit post,” says Ricky Camilleri, co-writer and co-producer of Our Hero, Balthazar, thanking me for not describing it as “edge-lordy.” On paper, the film, directed and co-written by Oscar Boyson, sounds like a provocation: a dark comedy about a teen who tries to stop a school shooting—not out of moral clarity, but out of ego.
Oscars 2026
Awards season, if you don’t know, sustains its own cottage industry. Entire columns and columnists are devoted to thinking about the Oscars year-round, and Oscar campaigns require money—serious money—to keep a film circulating in voters’ minds. That means awards often, but not always, follow the movies and nominees with the most buzz and visibility. This year, the Academy introduced a rule requiring voters to check a box confirming they’ve watched all the nominees.
Dinner and a movie
What if i just recommended two things? A thought: what if I kept it simple and recommended just two things each week—one movie, one restaurant—plus, a handful of short takes for good measure? It’s the original moviepudding format, sort of. Also, a genuine thank you to everyone who came out to the inaugural cinema supper club at Hudson Wilder. Tickets sold out in an hour, and it was so nice to meet some of you in real life. Consider it a trial run for the team and for me. Hopefully, more to come.
Against Nature: Feral Eating and Feminist Performance
This piece was originally published in Issue 8 of Notebook magazine as part of a broader exploration of food on film. The magazine is available via direct subscription or in select stores around the world. Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964). In Michelangelo Antonioni’s chromatic masterpiece Red Desert (1964), Monica Vitti bites into a half-eaten sandwich while crouched in a bramble patch, as if in secret shame.
Movies to watch on a fifth date
Do you remember what you watched on your first movie date? Or even which date it was? Mine with my husband was the second: Alphaville, after whiskey and grilled cheese at a bar that only served that. It was cold out, and we were just looking for something reliably good and perhaps hinted at our tastes at least a little. By the fifth date, things are different. By then, you’ve already established the obvious. Now it’s about small, telling things: do they squirm in discomfort? Laugh at the wrong moments?
IRL EVENT / In the Mood for Love
Film screening and 5-course dinner Thursday February 19 and Saturday February 21 7:00pm at Hudson Wilder $60 tickets. Purchase here. Join moviepudding, Hey! Wanna Hang, and glassware brand Hudson Wilder for dinner and a movie at their storefront in Brooklyn Heights to celebrate Lunar New Year and Valentine’s Day. Food provided by Jazz Canteen, the new restaurant concept from Hudson Wilder set to open later this year. Here’s to love new, old, and unrequited. If you’re a paid subscriber, come say hi.
“Trojan Horse Filmmaking”: Adam and Zack Khalil on Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild]
Back to selection Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild], courtesy of Sundance Institute by Elissa Suh in Directors, Interviews, Sundance on Feb 5, 2026 Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild], Adam Khalil, Sundance Film Festival 2026, Zack Khalil In 1990, a federal law was passed requiring the return of Indigenous human remains and sacred items to their rightful communities.
Short takes / Sundance 2026
Hello from Park City, where it is almost certainly warmer—and drier—than New York, a situation unacceptable for both those carving the slopes and people like me whose toxic trait, so to speak, is a deep and abiding love of winter. I’d planned to keep a running festival diary, but I’m on assignment for three different outlets and trying not to scoop myself. I genuinely don’t know how people do this on twitter, or now letterboxd, I suppose.
âWhat Is a Golf Course but the Gentrification of Land?â: Rafael Manuel on Filipiñana
Back to selection Filipiñana. Photo Credit: Potocol, Ossian International, Epicmedia, Easy Riders, Idle Eye by Elissa Suh in Directors, Interviews, Sundance on Jan 26, 2026 Filipiñana, Jia Zhangke, Rafael Manuel, Sundance Film Festival 2026 In Filipiñana, tension often lives inside the image itself: a desiccated pine tree creaks against a bright blue sky; mangos left to rot on the branch. There is beauty here, but also decay.
Familiar Touch and Ruth's borscht
I put off seeing Familiar Touch for ages—even after it won Best Actress and Best Director at Venice in 2024, screened in New Directors/New Films at Lincoln Center and MoMA in March, and had a theatrical run at Film Forum in June. I couldn’t summon the emotional fortitude for a film about an elegant older woman with dementia moving into assisted living, but finally did so from the comforts of my own home while playing catch up last month.
A few weeks ago on instagram, my friend Kate was bemoaning the first week of December—the unofficial holiday when the critics start to reveal their year-end lists, reliably touting the same four best movies in the name of good taste. (John Waters, famously, remains the exception.) “Best,” of course, shouldn’t be confused with “favorite,” though both are kinda subjective anyway—so why pretend otherwise? It makes things more fun.
The best things I ate in 2025
A mini sando consisting of bread made with gim (seaweed) and makgeolli (a fermented rice drink), seared Chilean seabass, and a jewel-like square of ganjang (soy sauce) jelly finished with a fringe of green onions. I don’t know how many rounds of R&D were needed to calibrate the strength of that ganjang gelatin, but they deserve a medal. Bravo. A close second: floating in a broth of pheasant and beef, sujaebi dough dyed to match traditional Korean stripe pattern called sekdong.
It’s remake season again, which is to say it’s always remake season. A proper one should update the material to meet our contemporary anxieties, but most of these films manage only the gesture, not the substance. Bugonia tries, but fails fundamentally as a movie. The Running Man delivers much amusement but never rises to what it promises. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle overcorrects. And other than relocating the story to nyc, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest… remains a mystery even to itself.
Movies to watch with your family
I’m on my way upstate to spend Thanksgiving with my parents and brothers. I’ve been the de facto movie-chooser for the family l since I went to film school and made it (more or less) my life.
Maternal breakdown cinema
I was out sick last week and finally embarked on a cultural pilgrimage I had managed to avoid my entire life: watching Sex and the City. Within a few episodes, I spotted Susan Seidelman and Nicole Holofcener directing credits, plus Justin Theroux, my eternal internet boyfriend. If someone had told me any of that sooner, I possibly would’ve tuned in years ago.
What's a good Tuesday night movie?
Mondays are for catching up—on errands, on e-mails, on whatever television everyone’s already spoiled. For me personally, it ends up trying on a TV show, hating it, and flipping to reruns of The X-Files or Survivor (yes, really) unless there’s an HBO miniseries that’s actually hitting the mark. Fridays are for the big things: blockbusters, dinner plans, maybe even the actual movie theater. Saturdays belong to ambition, and on Wednesdays I have a standing dinner with friends.
I'm screening a film next week in the East Village
MAISON DU BONHEUR Wednesday, November 5 7:00pm at Nightclub 101 I’m guest-programming a film for my friend Marie’s screening series on movies under 99 minutes. It takes place in the basement of Nightclub 101, which is run by the same folks behind Baby’s All Right and Funny Bar.
I'm screening a film next week in the East Village
MAISON DU BONHEUR Wednesday, November 5 7:00pm at Nightclub 101 I’m guest-programming a film for my friend Marie’s screening series on movies under 99 minutes. It takes place in the basement of Nightclub 101, which is run by the same folks behind Baby’s All Right and Funny Bar. On Wednesday we’re showing Maison du Bonheur—Canadian filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz’s 16mm documentary that captures the day-to-day of an astrologer who has lived in the same Montmartre apartment for more than fifty years.
Josh O'Connor, art thief, take two
The Mastermind begins with the bones of a heist movie—a crew (bumbling), a mark (the paintings of Arthur Dove), a plan (not so much)—and spends the next two hours quietly dismantling them. Always one for the incremental gestures and in between moments, Kelly Reichardt stages the crime as a form of unraveling. The filmmaker isn’t much interested in the mechanics of the heist (we do see it, and it’s hilariously inept), but the slow aftermath, which reveals J.B.’s existential clumsiness.
Josh O’Connor the art thief, take two
The Mastermind begins with the bones of a heist movie—a crew (bumbling), a mark (the paintings of Arthur Dove), a plan (not so much)—and spends the next two hours quietly dismantling them. Always one for the incremental gestures and in between moments, Kelly Reichardt stages the crime as a form of unraveling. The filmmaker isn’t much interested in the mechanics of the heist (we do see it, and it’s hilariously inept), but the slow aftermath, which reveals J.B.’s existential clumsiness.
‘Why Is Discomfort So Threatening?’: Filmmaker Mary Bronstein Talks ‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’
“Mommy is stretchable,” a young girl observes of her mother at the start of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Linda, the mother, bristles at the description, but it’s an apt one. How many mothers are made to extend themselves for others again and again—and how long can they do that before they snap? That, in a sense, is the story of motherhood and what Mary Bronstein’s new film captures with bruising, darkly funny precision.
NEW MOVIES, NEW RESTAURANT / Actors-turned-directors
On Monday I went to the secret NYFF screening of Marty Supreme and somehow found myself in the second row (thank you, Sayed)—close enough to clock the faint gleam of Timothée Chalamet’s scalp beneath a baseball cap, and to admire Josh Safdie’s anarchic beard. The energy was electric and I was, against my better judgment, starstruck, particularly when they trotted out Gwyneth Paltrow, feigning sheepishness, and Tyler the Creator, whose charisma cannot be contained.
Springsteen on the big screen, and where to eat near Lincoln Center
Previously: NYFF Diary no. 1 Today: A short reviews of movies from the festival, including new Baumbach, second Linklater, and imitations of Bruce Springsteen and Peter Hujar, all coming out this fall. Excerpted below. An intentionally short list of where to eat around Lincoln Center, because good food is worth traveling for, but herein are some more innocuous options. While it takes planning, Tatiana is worth the effort and the money. It is the no.1 establishment in the area worth traveling for.
NYFF 2025 / Shorts takes
True to form, Scott Cooper delivers a film as stiff and joyless as every one he’s made before, one that trudges through every prefab biopic beat with the automated finesse of a cover band. Deliver Me From Nowhere is film of embarrassments. There’s the secondhand embarrassment of watching Jeremy Allen White writhe through ersatz Boss impressions that look like pained orgasms. He sings, he strums, he even wears the right clothes, yet what comes across isn’t Bruce Springsteen but a parody of devotion.
Welcome to the New York Film Festival
The New York Film Festival is the hometown festival and it opens today. A diary here feels less compelling—most days look like my regular life, just with more movies and less vigilance about basic self-care. I get tired and end up flirting with the kind of dehydration that leads to migraines. It’s always easier to nurse one at home than in some fake four-star hotel. But, the first day of press screenings opened on an unexpectedly optimistic note, and that felt worth writing down.
The Best Safari Chairs for Your Inner Adventurer
Born from both adventure and practicality, the safari chair has transcended its 18th-century roots. Originally designed to be lugged around the great outdoors-as the name implies, these lightweight, collapsible chairs were intended as safari seating-the rugged, military-inspired seating has taken on more of a polished reputation today.
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