Reseñas de la crítica

If things sometimes feel overcooked, they’re commensurate with both the nerve-jangling energy of New York and the madness of a moment in which the United States president wants to all but annex Central America and erase its cultural identity.Ruizpalacios is clear-eyed in his anger and he captures the city with an outsider’s empathy for those clawing at its fringes, desperate to make it in a country even as it sells them a lie.

Shot in lustrous black and white with a few strategic flashes of colour, the film is often mesmerising, a feat of pure visual poetry that is at stark odds with the painfully real system of exploitation that it depicts.

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. But the exaggerated staginess and histrionic screeching start to grate long before this overstuffed meal is finished.

To overcook this metaphor, it’s like going to a restaurant with an elaborate tasting menu where each dish is presented with an artistic flourish but you spend just a little too much time waiting around between courses.

Here is a strangely exhausting movie, quaintly imagining the frenzied atmosphere of a New York restaurant kitchen as a microcosm of exploited migrant workers, full of macho shouting and self-conscious acting, with every speech a drama school audition piece... Alonso Ruizpalacios has given us some terrific work in the past... but I couldn’t make friends with this strained and histrionic picture.

The director’s visual virtuosity was very present in A Cop Movie, as the relationship between artifice and reality was prised apart. In many ways La cocina feels like a sibling film, but seen in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidential victory and his ruthless stand on immigration, the film’s depiction of the exploitation that underpins the American Dream feels depressingly timely.

Juan Pablo Ramírez’s impeccably choreographed monochrome cinematography captures a snapping, shrieking, stressful working environment punctuated by oddly magical interludes, including a story about lobster as haute cuisine and a supernatural tale about green light... La Cocina makes watching The Bear feel like listening to Enya in a garden centre.

Working with cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramírez and editor Yibrán Asuad — and shooting in black-and-white with meaningful splashes of color — Ruizpalacios creates a visual style that continues to reinvent itself right up to the end, crafting an unpredictable feeling that matches the volatile plotting.

La Cocina feels original... The genius of Wesker’s play rescues the liberalism of La Cocina. When it’s good, the sharpness and daring rectify the media’s lies about our broken border and make it the Altman movie we’ve longed for.

A powerful, bewildering work of despair and dejection — evoking that mixture of irritability and resignation that anyone who works in this business will intimately know — La Cocina stands apart from the recent glut of restaurants staged as battlegrounds through its aesthetic command of the workplace, its surrealist touches, and its cohesion of conflicting situational urgencies. I

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

“La Cocina,” a kitchen drama shot in velvety black-and-white, is the first English-language movie by the Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios. But the kitchen staff’s Spanish takes up nearly as much of the dialogue, fueling the film’s cultural and political tensions.