- Drama, Comedy
- 139 min
- R
Rotten Tomatoes72%Metacritic75IMDb7.0
Get back to work.
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.
Log it
Sign in to log this.
Character
Not read yet. Character is read in the background after the first visit.
Who loves it, who doesn't
No profiled raters yet.
Ask the title
A yes-or-no question, answered from what people wrote here, on TMDB and on Wikipedia. Never made up.
Reviews
No reviews yet.
Reviews on TMDB
Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Tastebuds's numbers.
- badelfon TMDB · Nov 20258/10
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
Read the whole review on TMDB - CinemaSerfon TMDB · Mar 20256/10
If you saw “Boiling Point” (2021) then you’ll get the gist of this drama set in an hectic New York restaurant kitchen. “The Grill” might look peaceful to the customers, but it’s kitchen is a multi-cultural, multi-lingual and attitudinal melting pot of cooks, waitresses and cleaners under the guidance of a no-nonsense chef (Lee Sellars) and a slimy manager “Luis” (Eduardo Olmos). It’s this latter man who finds there’s a problem one morning when his boss reports that $800-odd is missing from one of the cash registers and the owner “Rashid” (Oded Fehr) is seeing red. Using the investigation as a pretext, we quickly discover that this room is full of characters who generally rub along ok with each other, except for “Pedro” (Raul Briones) and “Max” (Spenser Granese), with the latter man frequently and violently fed up with the lack of English being spoken in this kitchen of Babel. Meantime, “Pedro” is trying to rekindle his relationship with waitress “Julia” (Rooney Mara) who is expecting, but not intending to have, his baby. With everyone working flat out, the search for the missing cash and the prevailing, accumulating, sense of toxicity amidst this atmosphere, the scene is set for qu
Read the whole review on TMDB
Cast
- Raúl BrionesPedro
- Rooney MaraJulia
- Anna DíazEstela
- Motell Gyn FosterNonzo
- Laura GómezLaura
- Oded FehrRashid
- James WaterstonMark
- Lee SellarsChef
- Eduardo OlmosLuis
- Spenser GraneseMax
Crew
- Alonso RuizpalaciosDirector
- Alonso RuizpalaciosScreenplay
- Juan Pablo RamírezDirector of Photography
- Tomás BarreiroOriginal Music Composer
- Yibrán AsuadEditor
- Gerardo GaticaProducer
- Lauren MannProducer
- Ramiro RuizProducer
Where to watch
Checking availability…
Often watched with
Recommendations from TMDB. Opening one adds it to Tastebuds
