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La Cocina

User Reviews

A review by badelf

★ 8/10 November 7, 2025
La Cocina: Society in a Pressure Cooker Not every film needs to be an Aesop's fable, and "La Cocina" understands this perfectly. Alonso Ruizpalacios has crafted an impressive slice-of-life film that elevates the genre by compressing time, making everything that can happen in a restaurant kitchen visible within 139 minutes. That alone is worth the price of admission. What makes the film remarkable is how successfully it offers a bird's eye view of society itself. The kitchen becomes a perfect microcosm of its setting, complete with all the warts: racism, class discrimination, dishonesty, and the relentless exploitation of workers. We see humanity at its most pressured, where the cracks in our social fabric become impossible to ignore. Visually, "La Cocina" is a delight. The black-and-white cinematography, the precise framing, and the pacing are as brilliant as the scr…
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A review by CinemaSerf

★ 6/10 March 29, 2025
If you saw “Boiling Point” (2021) then you’ll get the gist of this drama set in an hectic New York restaurant kitchen. “The Grill” might look peaceful to the customers, but it’s kitchen is a multi-cultural, multi-lingual and attitudinal melting pot of cooks, waitresses and cleaners under the guidance of a no-nonsense chef (Lee Sellars) and a slimy manager “Luis” (Eduardo Olmos). It’s this latter man who finds there’s a problem one morning when his boss reports that $800-odd is missing from one of the cash registers and the owner “Rashid” (Oded Fehr) is seeing red. Using the investigation as a pretext, we quickly discover that this room is full of characters who generally rub along ok with each other, except for “Pedro” (Raul Briones) and “Max” (Spenser Granese), with the latter man frequently and violently fed up with the lack of English being spoken in this kitchen of Babel. Meantime, “…
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