Two years ago, on Thanksgiving, the critic and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz published a video essay called “Feast” on Moving Image Source. Watching the 13-minute cinematic montage, posted below, has become, for me, a Thanksgiving tradition.

Seitz selected “images of food—and the preparation of food” from movies as old as Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) and as new as No Reservations (2007), with dozens more in between. The likely suspects—Big Night, Babette’s Feast, Eat Drink Man Woman, and so on—are represented, but so are A Patch of Blue and The Company and a host of other unexpected films. Seitz chose songs from a small handful of the movies (such as “Quail in Rose Petal Sauce” from Like Water for Chocolate and “Jump Into the Fire” from Goodfellas) to provide the soundtrack.

In putting it together, Seitz noticed a few things. For one, “the number of films built around the preparation and consumption of food (not just films about eating, but films about other subjects that just happen to contain a lot of food-related moments) has jumped sharply since the 1980s.” He has a few theories as to why, from the “eclipse of black-and-white film by color” (better suited to glorious food tableaus) to the desire in our increasingly lonely age to celebrate the community created by big family meals.

But my favorite of his observations concerns the unique opportunity for actors provided by cooking on screen. Cooking, Seitz says,

perhaps more than any activity, lets an actor exude absolute physical and intellectual mastery without seeming domineering or smug. Why is that? It's probably because, while cooking is a creative talent that has a certain egotistical component (what good cook isn’t proud of his or her skills?), there's something inherently humbling about preparing food for other people. It doesn't matter whether you're a workaday gangster footsoldier giving lessons on how to cook for 20 guys, like Richard Castellano's Clemenza in The Godfather, or a hyper-articulate, super-fussy kitchen philosopher like Tony Shalhoub in Big Night (“To eat good food is to be close to God...”), when you're cooking, it's ultimately not about you; it’s about the people at the table.

Happy Thanksgiving.