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 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

Ruizpalacios creates a visual style that continues to reinvent itself right up to the end, crafting an unpredictable feeling that matches the volatile plotting.

| Nov 1, 2024

Imagine such pressure — and, for many undocumented workers, the knowledge that you won’t be hired anywhere better. But Ruizpalacios diminishes these hard truths with flashy bids at profundity.

| Oct 29, 2024

“La Cocina” is a phenomenal showcase for Briones, who gives one of the most mesmerizingly multi-faceted performances of the year.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 25, 2024

La Cocina goes further than recasting the American dream as a nightmare and the much sought-after visa as a ticket to infinite exploitation.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 22, 2024

It’s deftly performed, the pace is appropriately hectic and yet it all seems, in the end, perhaps understandably, very familiar.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 20, 2024

“La Cocina,” Mexican writer/director Alonzo Ruizpalacios’ searing black and white slice of nightmare, is a monumental work of righteous anger.

| Feb 20, 2024

Its intricate character relationships and intensely stressful yet balletic kitchen scenes make for compelling viewing, so much so that the 140-minute runtime flies by.

| Feb 17, 2024

There’s a surging life force felt in every scene of Alonso Ruizpalacios’ superbly acted La Cocina — at times ebullient but more often on edge, if not careening dangerously toward disaster or violence.

| Feb 17, 2024

A chaotic symphony of nearly two dozen characters, this black-and-white indie confection (garnished with sparing touches of color) mixes biting social critique with stylistic bravura.

| Feb 16, 2024

While “La Cocina” can’t always shake the polemical stiffness of its source material or the political chokehold of its modernized setting, the film’s agit-prop expressionism allows it to push beyond the boundaries of other stories like it.

| Original Score: B | Feb 16, 2024