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Alonso Ruizpalacios’s “La Cocina” (English Title: The Kitchen), adapted from Arnold Wesker’s play The Kitchen, is a feverish live-wire immersion into a restaurant serving tourists at Times Square. Opening with the arrival of a young Mexican woman, Estella (Anna Diaz) seeking a cook’s job at the restaurant The Grill, there’s a note of anticipation tempered with grungy realism. But she’s not the primary character in the narrative, just an entry point. Quickly, the film swerves into one of the other cooks, Pedro (Raúl Briones), who shares a family history with Estella though initially he struggles to recall her. Their families have known each other since they were kids.

Pedro is a magnificent flirt, with an easy way of skidding around another’s sour mood by dialing up his casual humor and allure. In one of the most sexually bristling scenes, he pacifies his pregnant white American girlfriend,...

Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios has had a winning record coming to the Berlin Film Festival since 2013, when his film Gueros took the Best First Feature prize. Five years later he was back with his second, the sensational museum-heist film Museo, and deservedly won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay. His third, A Cop Movie, which plays with the traditional docu form by using actors, won Best Documentary at Mexico’s Golden Ariel Awards.

Ruizpalacios belongs in the same league as iconic current Mexican directors Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón and particularly Alejandro González Iñárritu, whose cinematic style seems closest to what Ruizpalacios has been doing. His latest trip to Berlin, La Cocina, reinforces the thrilling talent of this singular filmmaker who for the first time has shot a film using both Spanish and English. It features American star Rooney Mara as well as a stunning, uninhibited, shoot-for-the-stars turn from Raul Briones,...

Ernesto Contreras has the ability to spot poetry in the smallest of things. Even the title of his 2017 film, I Dream in Another Language, speaks volumes about the kind of world it engages in. However, it is one thing to spot poetry and completely another to be able to capture it. He is able to spot tenderness and truth in the world around him, but what appears to be the problem is the translation of that poetic truth on screen. His 2017 film suffered from the same problem of not being able to take a moment of truth to the next level, and that’s what happens in Where the Tracks End. It is the story of a boy named Ikal living in a railcar in rural Mexico and how he manages to scrape through the troubles of living a life on the margins.

There are multiple ‘tracks’ that the story...