Boiling Point

The nimble, naturalistic performers are uniformly terrific.

The result is a spicy nerve-jangler served with a chargrilled side order of jet-black gallows humour – a divine comedy barrelling towards inevitable tragedy, played out in hell’s kitchen where someone is bound to get burned.

Formally, the film seldom takes its foot off the gas.

Boiling Point grips remorselessly while it’s spinning all these plates, and somehow ladles onto them a smorgasbord of great, frazzled acting from all concerned.

There’s a barreling momentum to the filmmaking that feels true to the cut and thrust of restaurant life, regardless of the script’s digressions.

To the credit of all concerned, however the one-take approach feels appropriate and organic, rather than gimmicky or stunt-like.

Graham, Robinson, and Barantini’s thematic concerns about how restaurants work are strong enough ingredients. It’s too bad they’ve been subjected to the one-note flavoring of a single-take movie.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

'Boiling Point' is like if 'Birdman' and 'MasterChef' had a baby and 'Climax' raised it.

excellent [ ek-suh-luhnt ] adjective possessing outstanding quality or superior merit; remarkably good.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

(Mauro Lanari) Alcoholic, cocaine addict, separated from his wife, in debt, latecomer, sleepless, fresh from move: all the imaginable bad luck. Starting from these premises, things could only end badly for him regardless of the type of work. So the now worn-out location of the restaurant is completely superfluous. Authors like Ozu, Bresson, the Tati of "Playtime" ['67] would have made the breaking/collapse/boiling point more dramatic with the still, static, fixed camera to impotently shot the staging of impotence. Barantini makes the opposite choice: convulsive tale and uninterrupted steadicam for 86 minutes out of 92. Raffaele Meale writes that the director "seems to care more about the rhythm and spatiality to be managed than the psychologies of his characters". "Characters"? Unjustified accumulation of Fantozzian clichés. "There is a sense of dissatisfaction, and also emptiness. An exercise in style, not much more." Tzk: "a reflection on the one-shot film in today's cinema, after Hitchcock, Bazin, Metz" (Alessio Baronci). Wow.