My 2024 Favorite: A Knife-Sharp Film About New York

Forget the skyline. La Cocina (2024) shows you the other side of New York—the back kitchen, soaked in sweat and soda, where the American Dream starts to rot. No more Woody Allen Manhattan nostalgia. This is the real New York: luxury upstairs, chaos downstairs. Michelin stars in the front, slippery tile floors and broken Spanish in the back. A world built on invisible labor, immigrant hands, untold exhaustion. In the final scene, a cracked pager buzzes endlessly in a puddle of dishwater—still delivering orders from the pristine front of house. Its green light blinks like a predator’s eye, linking two worlds that can never meet. This isn’t just a film. It’s a laugh in the face of polite capitalism. #entertainment #movie #americanillusion