Sightlines · reception
How Babette's Feast was received
1987 · Gabriel Axel · Babette's Feast on Sightlines
The arc
An arthouse hit on arrival — it won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, the first Danish film ever to do so — and it has only grown warmer with age, settling in as the ur-'food film' and a perennial comfort-cinema recommendation.
What’s debated
Fans genuinely tussle over who the film belongs to: the devout read it as a parable of grace, the foodies claim it as pure sensualist cinema, and both sides insist the other is missing the point.
Its footprint
The feast itself escaped the screen: restaurants around the world stage recreations of the full menu (cailles en sarcophage and all), and it's the touchstone every later food film — Big Night, Chef, The Taste of Things — gets measured against. Pope Francis famously named it his favorite film.
Where it stands
A Criterion-blessed arthouse staple and the founding text of the food-film canon — beloved rather than fought over, the kind of film people press on you with a 'trust me'.
Did you know? Pope Francis has repeatedly named Babette's Feast his favorite film — he even cited it in his 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia.