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.
“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.
- 2/18/2024
- by Scott Roxborough
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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,...
The director of this lively tableaux is Alonso Ruizpalacios,...
- 2/16/2024
- by Rory O'Connor
- The Film Stage
“Both mother and baby are doing well,” claim so many birth announcements — an innocuous flash of good news that, in all too many cases, proves to be a bit premature. The baby may be fine after weathering the ordeal of entering the world; the mother might not yet be out of the woods. The strains and vagaries of postpartum depression — still widely misunderstood and even shamed by those who haven’t experienced it — morph into literal horrors in “Baby Ruby,” a stylish and suitably stressful debut feature from Tony-nominated playwright Bess Wohl (“Grand Horizons”). As Wohl rather boldly challenges her audience to maintain belief in, and sympathy for, the anxieties and psychoses tormenting otherwise privileged new mother Josephine (Noémie Merlant), any viewers who waver only prove her larger point.
Evocative and appropriately aggravating as “Baby Ruby” is in its portrayal of mental breakdown following traumatic childbirth, however, its parlaying of...
Evocative and appropriately aggravating as “Baby Ruby” is in its portrayal of mental breakdown following traumatic childbirth, however, its parlaying of...
- 2/2/2023
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
Photo: ‘I Carry You With Me’/Sony Pictures Classics ‘I Carry You With Me’, director Heidi Ewing’s newest film, is a masterpiece about the fragments of moments that shape us. Time and space are constantly changing, as are feelings and attitudes in this film. It’s also a testament to true love, and how that love can burn inside of us even decades later. Partly a story about romantic love, partly a story of immigration, and partly a story about change, ‘I Carry You With Me’ is a heart-wrenching, beautiful movie. A Feeling of Nostalgia and Loss Perhaps the most beautiful part of ‘I Carry You With Me’ is its cinematography. As Ewing stated in her interview with The Academy, she tends to use a voyeuristic approach. We peer around walls to watch Gerardo and Iván talk, making us feel like we’re as secretive as they have to be.
- 6/25/2021
- by Jordan Qin
- Hollywood Insider - Substance & Meaningful Entertainment
To Heidi Ewing, they were simply Iván and Gerardo, a longtime couple who owned restaurants in New York, liked to go dancing, were wonderful company to be around. They had met in Mexico in 1994. Iván had a son and aspirations to be a chef. Gerardo had grown up on a cattle ranch in Chiapas and worked as a teacher. He spotted Iván, closeted at the time, in a gay bar and attracted his attention with a laser pointer. They were very young then. Now they were married, and middle-aged, and settled down.
- 6/24/2021
- by David Fear
- Rollingstone.com
It feels like a lifetime ago that I watched I Carry You With Me. It was a Sundance press screening in the middle of my busiest day at the festival, and frankly, if I had to change locations to see it between my other screenings, I would have skipped it. But as Iván says in the film, sometimes destiny holds life’s surprises for us.
After directing documentaries for the last two decades, Heidi Ewing makes her narrative debut with this graceful look into the real lives of Iván García (Armando Espitia) and Gerardo ZaVe (Christian Vasquez), one which earned her Sundance’s Next Audience Award and Innovator Award. It’s a fitting honor from the festival because the film was born in Park City over drinks in 2012. Iván and Gerardo joined Ewing at the festival to support her project Detropia. There the couple told Heidi the story of their childhood,...
After directing documentaries for the last two decades, Heidi Ewing makes her narrative debut with this graceful look into the real lives of Iván García (Armando Espitia) and Gerardo ZaVe (Christian Vasquez), one which earned her Sundance’s Next Audience Award and Innovator Award. It’s a fitting honor from the festival because the film was born in Park City over drinks in 2012. Iván and Gerardo joined Ewing at the festival to support her project Detropia. There the couple told Heidi the story of their childhood,...
- 10/2/2020
- by Joshua Encinias
- The Film Stage
IFC Films is acquiring North American rights to “No Man’s Land,” a modern-day Western set along the border between the U.S. and Mexico. The indie studio is planning a release in 2021.
Filmed in Guanajuato, Mexico, the movie was directed by Conor Allyn (“Walk. Ride. Rodeo.”) and written by Jake Allyn (“The Quad”), brothers who grew up going back and forth across the border. Jake Allyn also stars in the movie, joining a cast that includes Frank Grillo, Andie MacDowell and George Lopez. Alex MacNicoll (“Vice”) and Jorge A. Jimenez (“Narcos”) also star.
The film follows border vigilantes Bill Greer (Grillo) and his son Jackson (Allyn), who are out on patrol when Jackson accidentally kills a Mexican immigrant boy. Bill tries to take the blame but Texas Ranger Ramirez (Lopez) sees through the lie, spurring Jackson to flee south on horseback across the Rio Grande. Pursued by Texas Rangers and Mexican federales,...
Filmed in Guanajuato, Mexico, the movie was directed by Conor Allyn (“Walk. Ride. Rodeo.”) and written by Jake Allyn (“The Quad”), brothers who grew up going back and forth across the border. Jake Allyn also stars in the movie, joining a cast that includes Frank Grillo, Andie MacDowell and George Lopez. Alex MacNicoll (“Vice”) and Jorge A. Jimenez (“Narcos”) also star.
The film follows border vigilantes Bill Greer (Grillo) and his son Jackson (Allyn), who are out on patrol when Jackson accidentally kills a Mexican immigrant boy. Bill tries to take the blame but Texas Ranger Ramirez (Lopez) sees through the lie, spurring Jackson to flee south on horseback across the Rio Grande. Pursued by Texas Rangers and Mexican federales,...
- 6/22/2020
- by Brent Lang
- Variety Film + TV
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