Itami uses his background in commercial art: every now and then, the characters assume shiny Pop poses, and the images have the slightly crazed look of heightened reality.

| Sep 13, 2023

So you're watching all this amazing food being consumed, you're getting hungrier and hungrier and you're laughing harder and harder.

| May 18, 2020

In Tampopo, every aspect of life is filtered through the prism of food - its rituals of preparation and consumption, its role as a social unifier or divider, its many healthy uses and perverse abuses.

| May 2, 2017

It unfolds as a series of madcap, effortlessly charming comic vignettes, centred around food and food culture in mid-'80s Japan.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 9, 2016

There are many love stories folded into this film's enjoyably meandering two hours, but "Tampopo" is above all about the romance of food, and the joyous, agonizing devotion and hard work required to tease out its manifold mysteries.

| Oct 27, 2016

Tampopo creates a culinary empire of the senses while entertaining an audience like crazy.

| Oct 20, 2016

A biting satire of Japanese culture and its uneasy incorporation of Western influences.

| Oct 20, 2016

Japanese films have commented before on the intrinsic connection between food and sex, but not with the erotic gusto of Juzo Itami's Tampopo and rarely with the comic lustiness of this broad-scale satire.

| Mar 13, 2015

Itami's humor and invention is such that we never have a chance to feel deprived. His stylistic palette and sense of fun are so wide-ranging that he can oscillate between brightness and darkness to articulate one gag.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 13, 2015

Charming and touching, this film about the relationship between the widow and the trucker is a pleasant surprise.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 13, 2015

Tampopo is, among many other things, the first "spaghetti eastern" and one of its particular charms is that it celebrates as much as satirizes. No movie gourmet with exotic tastes should miss it.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 13, 2015

It's a funny story beautifully told.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 13, 2015

The movie makes you laugh, gets you hungry, stirs things up.

| Mar 13, 2015

A thoroughly offbeat but most enjoyable comedy on the subject of food.

| Mar 26, 2009

It is often very amusing, although the ragged, free-wheeling structure tends to blunt Itami's somewhat obvious thesis, that eating is more closely connected to sex than we would normally admit.

| Jun 24, 2006

Tampopo is buoyantly free in form. It's as much an essay as it is a narrative -- always ready to digress into random gags and comic anecdotes.

Full Review | Aug 30, 2004

It's half movie, half dessert-topping -- a film gourmand's lusty dream.

| Jan 1, 2000

Director Itami has produced an engaging cinematic hybrid, brilliantly stir-frying Japanese food -- and other -- obsessions into cowboy themes.

| Jan 1, 2000

Tampopo is one of those utterly original movies that seems to exist in no known category.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 1, 2000