La Cocina

La Cocina

By

  • Genre: Drama, Comedy
  • Release Date: 2024-10-25
  • Runtime: 139 minutes
  • : 6.978
  • Production Company: Filmadora
  • Production Country: Mexico, United States of America, Sweden
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6.978/10
6.978
From 68 Ratings

Description

In the sweltering back kitchen of a Times Square restaurant, undocumented cook Pedro is caught between mounting pressures at work and a complicated romance with waitress Julia. When money goes missing, suspicion spreads, igniting tensions that threaten to upend the fragile hopes of the staff.

Trailer

Reviews

  • badelf

    8
    By badelf
    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 screenplay. Ruizpalacios creates a documentary-like immersion that never feels static, capturing the frenetic energy of kitchen labor while maintaining compositional control. The film's deepest moment comes through Nonzo's green light story: a parable about someone so dehumanized by the powerful that nothing remains, until the sky opens and a green light shines down, a cosmic reminder of inherent human value before he disappears. In the closing shot, Ruizpalacios employs the Schindler's List technique, breaking into color to illustrate this metaphor. After 139 minutes of monochrome chaos, that single moment of color affirms what the film quietly insists throughout: these invisible workers are human, and therefore invaluable.

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