The Menu (2022) review

Twelve adventurous diners - including "foodie" Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), his "date" Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), critic Lillian (Janet McTeer), aging actor George (John Leguizamo), etc. - take a boat to a private island where they intend to eat a multi-course meal at the exclusive restaurant Hawthorne, which is run by superstar chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes); the evening starts normally enough, but then Julian and his staff get increasingly passive-aggressive with their guests ... and then it gets violent.  It's a little too easy to go after culinary snob crowd (hydrocolloids! transglutaminase! foam!) and the storyline becomes considerably more flamboyant and ridiculous as it goes along, but the top-notch cast - Fiennes revels in villainy, Anya does well with streetwise characters - helps "elevate" the B-movie plot.  While I personally have no issues with "molecular gastronomy" and think the food made by René Redzepi, Ferran Adrià, Dominique Crenn (who created the dishes for this) and others is pretty and creative, I'm totally in agreement with the iconic Anthony Bourdain: there's nothing wrong with being a cheap, nasty, low-down burger slut.