Burnt review: Bradley Cooper food film turns up the heat in the kitchen

So many Hollywood food films get it wrong. Bloated pieces of faff that play like someone eating with their mouth open. Romanticising the professional kitchen to be a place where no one ever swears, staff work a standard eight-hour shift and drug abuse is never an issue.

Burnt is the latest food film off the pass and it avoids many of its contemporaries' failings (although the Michelin Guide worship is a bit much at times). It stars Bradley Cooper as chef Adam Jones, a former enfant terrible of the Parisian restaurant scene. At the height of his fame, Cooper held two Michelin stars, but lost them in a sea of drugs and debauchery. After serving his penance for three years shucking oysters in Louisiana, Jones heads to London to shake up the dining world once more.

He puts together a crack team of cooks Ocean's Eleven-style, led by gifted sous chef and love interest Helene (Sienna Miller), and the ragtag bunch set up shop at The Langham Hotel, intent on earning its restaurant a third Michelin star.

This is a film about the arrogance and ego of top-tier chefs ("Some nights I was almost as good as I thought I was," reflects Jones on his Paris career) and the cost of the pursuit of perfection. Jones has a good heart and mountains of integrity, but he's also a cranky bastard, bad at relationships and reluctant to compromise. A dressing down of the kitchen staff at the film's midpoint makes Marco Pierre White look like Margaret Fulton, for instance, and his hatred for sous vide is a running gag. "I'm going to cook like we did in the old days," he says. "Before we started warming up fish in little plastic bags."

Fans of food porn are well serviced. Celebrity British chef Marcus Wareing designed dozens of Michelin-star-quality dishes for the camera to focus on, including translucent white turbot, blushing pink lamb and the birthday cake of a young girl's dreams. However, if you're anything like me, you'll find the food that you want to eat most captured on London's streets (check out that slow-cooked brisket!).

Burnt is a fine addition to the pantheon of food movies, perhaps only surpassed by Ratatouille in showcasing the white heat of the professional kitchen in all its red-eyed glory. Well worth a watch if you've ever been burnt by an oven, deep fryer or restaurant critic.

Just one quibble though: for all the attention to detail applied to the food and kitchen, why does Uma Thurman's London food critic character hold her wine glass like a drunk aunt on Boxing Day? A bit of civility, please.