Painterly, unsettling look at the food we eat - `Our Daily Bread' (star)(star)(star)12

Shooting all over Europe, Austrian-born filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter casts a calmly unsettling spell with this documentary reverie on what we eat, and how it's processed in an overwhelmingly mechanized age designed to make the concept of the family farm seem like a nostalgic joke.

There's no narration and no music, and you don't miss either. Geyrhalter and his partner, Wolfgang Widerhofer (who edited and established the "dramatic structure"), take us inside slaughterhouses, chicken farms, a greenhouse where row upon row of peppers are picked by a solitary worker and--from a thresher's-eye-view perspective--a wheat field.

Geyrhalter's eye is painterly, but it's more than that: The intuitive flow of the images is wholly cinematic, even though individual vignettes often unfold before a motionless camera. Other shots track either left or right, revealing another startling panorama of human and machine, or machine and nature, or countless animals playing their anonymous role in the assembly line of industrialized food production. If "Our Daily Bread" is political, it's blessedly indirect and happily devoid of thesis points. The images recall Kubrick in their extreme, head-on formality and tight, obsessive control. This is "Fast Food Nation" envisioned, "Koyaanisqatsi"-like, on a grand scale: "Fast Food Planet."