Opiniões dos críticos

"Soul Kitchen" can frequently be seen straining for laughs, but it's saved from terminal dopiness by the enthusiasm of its actors...

There’s no denying that “Soul Kitchen” is a film that delights in contrivance and improbability, but it does so with such a big-hearted sense of fun that it is hard not to be swept away. No matter what style he chooses to work in, Akin is a filmmaker first and foremost, and that makes all the difference.

Soul Kitchen is sprawling, undisciplined, raucous, occasionally crass—and so full of life you forgive it everything.

Its insistent zaniness makes “Soul Kitchen” very different in spirit from Mr. Akin’s two previous films, “Head-On” and “The Edge of Heaven,” which established him as a major European filmmaker. Seriously silly, it evokes the same high-spirited, pan-European multiculturalism in which people of all ages and backgrounds blithely traverse national borders as they aggressively pursue their destinies.

[P]erhaps his most broadly entertaining effort to date, the filmic equivalent of a big, shaggy bearded collie, eager for people to scruff its floppy ears. And a little slobbering aside, it’s just as irresistible.

It’s hard to hate a film so inclusive of its characters’ emotional and sensory compasses, but even harder to overlook its unexpectedly trite ear for music and willingness to trade cultural insight for obvious, crowd-pleasing gags.

Like the aphrodisiac-spiked dessert that Shayn prepares one night, the movie’s effects may not linger long, but they are feverishly fun and guilt-free while they last.

The movie’s utterly predictable, crassly formulaic ingredients (there’s even an Udo Kier cameo) go down easier with a pumping, eclectic soundtrack... the movie doesn’t have much to say politically, and what it does say isn’t interesting. But Soul Kitchen is still a lot of fun.

This sort of slam-bang Marx Brothers comedy, where the coincidences pile atop each other and almost every scene ends in chaos, isn't necessarily Akin's strong suit.

More feelgood than funny, Fatih Akin’s Hamburg-set food n’ soul music comedy is nevertheless a likeable, peppy between-projects divertissement for the German-Turkish director. Though it suffers from second-act doldrums, Soul Kitchen’s real strength lies in the way it updates and puts a new urban spin on the Heimatfilm genre of the 1950s.