Movie Pastries: The Best Sweet, Flakey Treats On Screen

or: What defines an auteur is a good pastry shot...

Jul 22, 2024

A Returning Pâtisserie Customer…

Last week, while I was on vacation, I shared with you the childlike wonder that comes with PB&Js on screen. I’m pleased to report that, in between jumping in lakes and huffing up mountains, I found multiple opportunities to consume peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and posted about such.

Now that I’ve returned from my vocational slumber, it’s only right to come back swinging and bookend my trip away with another round-up: This time, we’re talking pastries.

Pastries, as a category of food, has loosely defined margins, feathering out into debatable concoctions such as cakes or shortbread. At their core, pastries are defined by the fat content of their dough, which is relatively high compared to other forms of dough (such as those for baking bread.) Everything from éclairs to empanadas fall under the pastry umbrella.

Croissants, tarts, danishes, and strudels. Baklavas, pastéis de nata, macarons, and choux. Pastizzi, cannoli, rugelachs, and mille-feuilles. Sfoliatelle, bear claws, pains au chocolat and pop tarts. Doughnuts, cronuts, hot cross buns, and British pasties. Pies, pazcki, samosas, and turnovers. Pastries sure do cast a wide net. While our ultimate goal here at Film Flavor is to eat our way through each one of these pastries and find a film to match, that pursuit may take a lifetime. Until such light leaves my eyes, I’ve rounded up my favorite on-screen pastries of all-time, to date!

Pastries at the Movies: A Best-Of Roundup

Now, without further ado, let’s explore some of my favorite pastries that have graced the silver screen…

Marie Antoinette (2006, Dir. Sofia Coppola)

Starting off strong with the pastry film to end all pastry films, Sofia Coppola’s 2006 masterstroke Marie Antoinette featured a cornucopia of pastries provided by the now-famed pâtisserie Ladurée. The high-end delectable manufacturer worked with the film’s production design team to supply on-screen desserts, mixing authentic 18th-century French recipes with macarons fit for modern sensibilities.

In the scene below, Kristen Dunst’s queen tries on outfits and eats confections with her ladies-in-waiting, subverting Hollywood’s Y2K penchant for dress-up montages, all with bon bons galore.

Inglourious Basterds (2009, Dir. Quentin Tarantino)

Inglourious Basterds contains what is very likely my all-time favorite pastry scene in a movie. Set in an alternate universe’s World War II, Christoph Waltz plays an SS officer, Hans Landa, who ordered the death of Shosanna’s entire family. Now, Shosanna’s lives as an undercover goy, working as a film projectionist at a theater the Nazi’s are considering using for a propaganda film premiere. In the scene below, we watch as Landa and Shosanna eat strudel, all the while unsure if Landa knows the truth about who Shosanna really is.

After seeing the whole film in context, there is hardly a soul on earth whose blood does not turn cold when Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa cautions “Attendez de la creme!” with a wagging finger.

The attention to detail in the scene is what truly sears this movie into my brain: When Landa puts out his cigarette on the strudel, the dessert takes the form of a house with a chimney… a house that looks remarkably like the one Shosanna’s family died in.

To me, the similarities between Sofia Coppola and Quentin Tarantino are on full display in these scenes: On of the most impactful shots of each auteur’s career involves a pastry.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961, Dir. Blake Edwards)

Littering sorority girls’ dorm room walls and the prize section of local fairground games across America is an image known to us all: Audrey Hepburn, draped in pearls and black, going to town on a croissant and take-out coffee as she stares into the robin-egg-blue windows of a luxury jeweler on the streets of New York City.

Indeed, the opening scene of Breakfast at Tiffany’s skyrocketed so far into the zeitgeist, it’s use has unfortunately become a cliche. Despite the films shortcomings, the film has so much to offer modern audiences, and I’d argue to put it up for a rebrand. I urge all those reading this to give the film a watch tonight and reconsider Holly Golightly beyond the manic pixie dream girl facade.

Whenever I grab a cortado and vegan chocolate tahini cookie from my favorite bakery (gatekept close to my heart), stroll the streets of Williamsburg and stare longingly into the windows of Catbird as I contemplate going into credit card debt to get another permanent bracelet, I tap into this Big Capote Energy.

Poor Things (2023, Yorgos Lanthimos)

After I wrote about the pasties de nata (Portuguese custard tarts) featured in Poor Things last year, Film Flavor received a small but noticeable influx of social media reposts. At the time, Poor Things was the talk of the town: Will it win Best Picture at the Oscars? Was the film misogynistic? Even though I believe I am a secure person, would I be willing to shove 12 pastries into my mouth in an unsightly fashion while on camera like Emma Stone did?

Fast-forward seven months, and director Yorgos Lanthimos has already put out another film, and the pop culture foodies have moved on to talk of Kamala Harris’s coconuts and BRAT summer bratwurst. And while I am the biggest indulger of those delights, I do strongly believe we need to keep the pastel de nata hype going. After all, my voice alone will not help bully my local bakers into selling the addictive custard tart.

It’s Complicated (2009, Dir. Nancy Meyers)

Another under-appreciated auteur known for decisive production design, Nancy Meyers has brought us some of the best food-in-film scenes in recent memory. One such scene, below, features Meryl Streep, a wildly successful pastry chef and baker, as she and a hungry Steve Martin get a hankering for chocolate croissants. Other scenes in the film feature equally mouth-watering dishes: from breakfast pancakes to trays full of tarts and scones.

Over a decade later, and now Meryl is starring as Martin Short’s love interest on the Steve Martin show Only Murders in the Building. Meanwhile, fellow OMITB star Da’Vine Joy Randolph made waves starring in 2023’s Christmas foodie film of the year, The Holdovers. Needless to say, the food-in-film cinematic universe always finds a way to loop back around to Nancy Meyers.

Pretty Woman (1990, Dir. Garry Marshall)

Regrettably, Pretty Woman has not aged nearly as well as Garry Marshall’s crown jewel, The Princess Diaries. In fact, I was planning to write an entire Film Flavor piece about this movie until I sat down, watched the film in full, and realized how WILDLY misogynistic and, well, bad it was. Despite literally everything else about the movie being horrible, Julia Roberts and the food-filled scenes provide respite in the rough.

Below, we watch Julia dine on croissants, its important to remember only the asinine laugh at people chewing with their mouth open. But dang, those croissants look good!

Groundhog Day (1993, Dir. Harold Ramis)

While writing this piece, it occured to me that, linguistically, the word “donut” is now becoming a widespread replacement for its predecessor, “doughnut.” Popularized by brands such as Dunkin’ Donuts (ironically, now just “Dunkin’ ”), the word “donut” used to irk me. But, as Merriam-Webster points out, donut-lovers are simply following the time-honored tradition of phonetic-based spelling reform. And, if Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell in Groundhog Day have taught me anything, its the importance of the passage of time. And doughnuts.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, Wes Anderson)

Like Tarantino, Meyers, and each and every Coppola, Wes Anderson’s production design sets his work a cut above. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, audiences are not only treated with a variety of well-plated confections, but the aesthetically-pleasing making-of such pastries. To some, his frames may come off over-engineered and trite, but in the hearts of the majority, Wes Anderson is at his best when satisfying his every visual craving.

The Godfather (1972, Dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.

The greatest film of all time shoves cannolis to center stage in one of its most pivotal sequences. A true masterpiece, through and through. (Excuse me while I head over to Mike’s…)

Once Upon a Time in America (1984, Dir. Sergio Leone)

As much as I love British television, this pastry-centric sequence from Once Upon a Time in America sums up the hedonism of youth far better than any Skins UK episode.

The dessert featured in this scene is a charlotte russe cake. Though its pastry status is debatable, this charlotte russe puts Mr. Leone up there with all of the other pastry-auteur greats listed in this post.