It was during the filming that Nossiter met Quentin Crisp, who later became the star of his first feature film, Resident Alien, a hybrid fiction-documentary also starring John Hurt and Holly Woodlawn. Theatrically released in 1991, after premieres at the Berlin and Toronto Film Festivals, Resident Alien, which he wrote, produced and directed, is a comic portrait of the last, tattered days of New York’s bohemian underground. It was rereleased in 2005 on DVD in the US in an edition with a later, twinned film Losing The Thread, a comedy about art world follies and the triumph of tourism in Florence, Italy. His second feature film 'Sunday (1996), which he produced with Alix Madigan, co-wrote with James Lasdun and directed, won the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize for Best Film and Waldo Salt award for Best Screenplay and the Deauville Film Festival's Grand Prize for Best Film and their International Critics' Prize, as well as earning a selection in Un Certain Regard in Cannes. Starring David Suchet, Sunday is a dark romantic comedy about the travails of an unemployed IBM employee among the homeless in Queens and his fairy tale one day love affair with an ageing actress.
A trained sommelier, in parallel to his film career, he has made wine lists and trained staffs for a variety of restaurants in New York, Paris and Rio de Janeiro, including “Balthazar”, “Rice”, “Il Buco” “Man Ray”, “Roberta Sudbrack”, Claude Troisgros and “Aprazivel”.
His book Taste & Power: The wine world wars, (French: Le Goût et le Pouvoir), was published in 2007 by Editions Grasset in France, drawing varied reactions from the wine community, including Robert M. Parker, Jr who accused Nossiter of stupidity and bigotry.
