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Set at a restaurant that caters to tourists in Times Square, Alonso Ruizpalacios’s La Cocina, adapted from Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play The Kitchen, revolves around Pedro (Raúl Briones), an undocumented Mexican line cook, and Julia (Rooney Mara), a white American working front of house. When $800 goes missing from the till, triggering an investigation by restaurant management, their love story derails. Throughout, Ruizpalacios allows the Grill to be both exactly what it is—a specific workplace with its own Kitchen Confidential-style rituals and pecking order—and a microcosm of American capitalism. “American” in the broadest sense since, as Pedro reminds us, “America is not a country.”

In an important scene, the Grill’s second-generation Mexican American manager, Luis (Eduardo Olmos), is interrogating Pedro, whom he suspects of having stolen the money to pay for the abortion that Julia wants and, coincidentally, would cost $800. While the intransigent line cook sidesteps Luis...

The Berlin Film Festival kicked off its 74th edition February 15 with the opening-night world premiere screening of Small Things Like These, the Irish drama starring Oscar-nominated Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy. It started 10 days of debuts including for movies starring Rooney Mara, Isabelle Huppert, Gael García Bernal, Kristen Stewart and more.

This year’s Competition lineup features films from a swath of international filmmakers including Olivier Assayas, Mati Diop, Hong Sangsoo, Bruno Dumont and Abderrahmane Sissako.

The Berlinale runs through February 25.

Keep checking back below as Deadline reviews the best and buzziest movies of the festival. Click on the titles to read the full reviews.

Another End ‘Another End’

Section: Competition

Director: Piero Messina

Cast: Gael García Bernal, Renate Reinsve, Bérénice Bejo, Olivia Williams, Pal Aron

Deadline’s takeaway: The script, while ambitious, is laden with philosophical musings that often feel detached from the emotional core of the story. Another End...

It was when Alonso Ruizpalacios was in London working as a dishwasher at the (now-extinct) Rainforest Cafe that he came up with the idea for La Cocina.

“I was a drama student and I’d just read the [1957] play The Kitchen by Arnold Wesker and to make the work — which is tough, monotonous and very, very hard — bearable, I’d look at it through the creative lens of the play. If you see how a kitchen works, you realize it is much like the world, like [how] society works. Wesker says for Shakespeare all the world is a stage, whereas for him all the world is a kitchen.”

It was decades later, after success with Mexican films like Museo and A Cop Movie, that Ruizpalacios came back to the idea, taking The Kitchen as the jumping-off point for his English-language debut, transferring the action from late-’50s London to modern-day New York.

Egos are charred and tempers seared in La Cocina, a kitchen nightmare set in the engine rooms of a vast Times Square eatery where the staff have more pressing things to worry about than rising temperatures. Take Pedro, a hardened and still-undocumented line cook whose outbursts of ideology can only mask his resentments and vulnerability for so long. Then there’s Julia (Rooney Mara), who is carrying Pedro’s unborn child, hiding her morning sickness in the staff room and planning to sneak out on break to get an abortion. And then there’s Estela (Anna Diaz), our eyes and ears: fresh off the proverbial boat, with barely a word of English, asking strangers on the subway how to get to 45th street before being unceremoniously tossed into a lunch shift that soon resembles The Raft of the Medusa, adrift on a sea of Cherry Coke.

The director of this lively tableaux is Alonso Ruizpalacios,...

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,...

There’s a surging life force felt in every scene of Alonso Ruizpalacios’ superbly acted La Cocina — at times ebullient but more often on edge, if not careening dangerously toward disaster or violence. Think The Bear on cocaine with a Red Bull chaser and you get some idea of the sustained intensity and simmering pressure of this bruising tragicomedy about what the diners (mostly) don’t see during a working day in a busy Times Square restaurant.

The Mexican writer-director has style to burn, evident in the intoxicatingly textured black-and-white visuals, the livewire editing and the striking use of music, from solemn choral pieces to cacophonous jazz. Even if he takes too long wrapping up an overwrought climactic crescendo, this is a compelling vision of the immigrant experience as a hellish limbo in which even the seeming ballast of community, brotherhood and love can be illusory.

In his previous films Güeros,...

Twenty years have passed since Carlos Santana made music history by tying Michael Jackson’s record for most Grammy Awards won in a single ceremony. And even though his head was spinning that night, he still remembers how unusual it was. “On the actual night, I kept making fun of it, saying, ‘I feel like a doggy retrieving a frisbee,'” the guitarist says now. “I kept going back and forth, back and forth.”

On February 23rd, 2000, Santana claimed eight trophies, including the highly coveted Record of the Year and Album of the Year awards,...