The Kitchen (2019)

The Kitchen has the rare pleasure of watching three women step into a vacuum of power and discover, to everyone’s surprise, that they’re better at the job than the men who left it behind. Andrea Berloff shoots 1978 Hell’s Kitchen with a grimy, lived-in grit, and the movie moves with the hard pulse of a street-level crime saga—tense, bruising, and unapologetically adult. Melissa McCarthy brings a fierce, grounded authority, Tiffany Haddish crackles with volatile energy, and Elisabeth Moss gives the story its sharpest edge, while Margo Martindale strolls in like a queen and quietly steals oxygen from every room. It’s not for the squeamish—this is violent, profane, and dark—but if you want a tough, actor-driven mob drama with a fresh angle and real presence, it’s an easy gamble.

The Kitchen clearly wants to be a gritty, female-led mob takeover story with a 1970s Hell’s Kitchen vibe and three powerhouse leads proving they can run the rackets as well as any man. The problem is it often plays like a checklist of crime-movie beats rather than a smoothly escalating drama, with thin character work and a tone that wobbles between empowerment thriller and grim brutality without fully earning either. It’s also relentlessly violent and profane, so if you’re looking for a clever, nuanced gangster saga or anything remotely fun, this will likely feel heavy and oddly rushed at the same time. Still, McCarthy, Haddish, and Moss bring enough presence to make individual scenes pop, so it may work for you if you mainly want tough performances and don’t mind a messy, body-count-first crime story.