The film powerfully illustrates how contemporary capitalism dehumanises and exploits immigrant workers, wrecking their belief in the American Dream.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 12, 2025

When a pipe bursts and floods the space, the camera captures a farcical ballet choreographed by a gleeful demon. The scene rivals the best moments from Marx Brothers’ films like Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera.

| Apr 9, 2025

It is bleak and pessimistic, with a little twang of beauty and hope, and a rich meal of a film that stands as an equal to other recent immigration-centred dramas such as The Brutalist.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 4, 2025

Parts of it are excellent: there’s a propulsive, unpredictable energy to the kitchen during the midday rush; the direction, and the agile choreography of cast and camera, are breathtaking.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 1, 2025

Unashamedly heavy on the seasoning, certainly, but a feast nonetheless.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 28, 2025

Ruizpalacios’s thrilling, sprawling drama takes on late-stage capitalism, exploitation and the precariousness of immigrant life in extravagant style.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 28, 2025

...the lengthy running time and the director’s inability to know when to let us ask for the bill and go home, stops La Cocina from being quite as great as it could have been.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 26, 2025

The Mexican film-maker Alonso Ruizpalacios has given us some terrific work in the past... but I couldn’t make friends with this strained and histrionic picture.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 24, 2025

... at times, virtuosity seems to engulf the characters and the metaphor becomes oversimplified. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 21, 2025

Takes its chances at 139 minutes, every second a high pitch besides which it’s stagey and stilted at times and in sum, utterly exhausting. But it spotlights the plight of undocumented immigrants trying to make a wage, avoid capture and deportation

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 6, 2024

Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios updates Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play, The Kitchen to a contemporary New York restaurant in a drama that’s as thematically blunt as it is exhilaratingly theatrical in its critique of contemporary America.

| Original Score: A-minus | Dec 4, 2024

In this bleak film, reality is a bad meal to swallow.

| Original Score: C+ | Dec 4, 2024

The whole affair is a whirlwind of ideas and events that make for an eventual and entertaining feature worth dining out for.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 28, 2024

We are faced with an obvious film, impeccable in many aspects, but so prone to exhibitionism that it presents irritating signs of the same structural dehumanization that it seeks to relevantly denounce so urgently. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 27, 2024

The mire is resolved with a final catharsis that comes like a shipwreck that's as spectacular as it is vacuous in its reflection on survival within the American dream. [Full review in Spanish]

| Nov 16, 2024

A frantic tale about the oppressive forces of capitalism, led by Raul Briones’ bold performance. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 14, 2024

Where the real flavor is found is in the secondary characters, cooks of all nationalities whose stories reflect the pain, melancholy and sorrow of migrant life. [Full review in Spanish]

| Nov 11, 2024

Even if the recipe is sometimes a little bland, this black-and-white drama detailing the immigrant experience from the kitchen of an upscale Times Square restaurant gives you plenty to chew on.

| Nov 8, 2024

A wild criticism of Western capitalist society within the kitchen. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 8, 2024

With Rooney Mara and a brilliant Raúl Briones as anchors, director Alonso Ruizpalacios turns the "American dream" into a boiling Babel-like nightmare. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 8, 2024