Tessa Thompson names her four favourite movies: “Guts me every single time”
One of the longest-running complaints against the Marvel Cinematic Universe is its lack of well-written female characters, which is an issue across superhero media in general that needs DC to also do a lot of work, but because Marvel is the industry leader, their lacking in this arena feels like a bigger issue.
There are some exceptions, however, for which we must turn to Tessa Thompson, who, since Thor: Ragnarok, has played Valkyrie, the badass sole survivor of a band of fearsome female fighters. She was the breakout star of that movie and quickly became a mainstay of the MCU, appearing in three more movies to date.
The alliterative star’s profile had been on the rise for some time up to this point, but this is what took her to the next level, making her an international superstar, which meant it was only a matter of time before the all-seeing eye of Letterboxd chose her as its next victim.
At the premiere of her latest movie, Hedda, Thompson was cornered by the dreaded three dots and asked the question every actor dreads, except her. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long!” she exclaimed when asked to offer her ‘Four Favourites’, and she wasn’t kidding, as she proceeded to rattle off her choices in quick succession.
She outed herself as a big fan of foreign cinema with two of her movies, where first up, we have Tampopo, a Japanese culinary comedy from director Juzo Itami. A so-called ‘ramen western’, the film follows two truck drivers helping to turn around a failing noodle restaurant, with its satire of various elements of Japanese culture easily making it the sexiest movie scene of all time to be centred on pork, noodles and an egg yolk.
Her next pick, Betty Blue, continues this erotic theme. Released under the name ‘37°2 le matin’ in its native France, this outing from director Jean-Jacques Beineix stars Jean-Hugues Anglade as a handyman driven to madness by his dream of writing a novel.
While Tampopo has a devoted following all around the world, this movie is much more obscure, and according to Letterboxd’s own metrics, only 47,000 of its members have seen it, around a quarter of Tampopo’s number; still, Thompson likes it, so that’s alright.
As for her other two choices, they’re a lot more mainstream, wherein she expressed a love for Spike Lee’s epic biopic Malcolm X, which stars David Washington as the iconic civil rights leader. Interestingly, both Lee and Thompson are being honoured at the upcoming Critics’ Choice Association’s Celebration of Black Cinema & Television, raising curiosity regarding whether it’s a coincidence or possibly a foreshadowing of a collaboration between the two.
As for her final pick, that was the one Thompson was the most sure about: “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stays in the top four, regardless of the day, season, year, month,” she said of Michel Gondry’s mind-wiping classic, adding, “I watch it a couple times a year… Totally heartbreaking, like guts me every single time. Even though I know how it ends, every time it ends, I’m like, ‘Phew!’”
Tessa Thompson’s four favourite films:
- Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1985)
- Betty Blue (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986)
- Malcom X (Spike Lee, 1992)
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
