The Kitchen (2019)

The Kitchen arrives as a 2019 crime picture in which three Hell's Kitchen housewives, circa 1978, inherit the Irish mob after the FBI carts their husbands away. Andrea Berloff directs her own screenplay, adapted from a DC Vertigo comic, and the enterprise carries the quiet confidence of a first-time filmmaker who has studied the genre's furniture closely. Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss take the leads. The premise is empowerment by way of extortion, and the film knows it. Kathy eventually announces at a graveside that she entered the rackets to attain autonomy, not to feed her children. That line is the thesis statement, delivered with the subtlety of a cinder block through a window.

The casting draws a certain attention. Haddish and Common occupy an Irish-American underworld where such faces were historically scarce, and the film treats this as ordinary ensemble business, which is either admirable restraint or an oversight. Ethnic friction supplies most of the plot's engine: Irish unions, Italian territory, Jewish hiring arrangements, all negotiated like zoning disputes. Race itself goes largely unexamined, which keeps that register muted. Elsewhere the ledger is thin. No LGBTQ threads. No climate anxiety. No commentary on body image despite McCarthy's presence. No neurodivergent characters. Criminal enterprise functions as a ladder for personal ambition, never as an indictment of capital. The point is power, and the film is honest about wanting it.

It plays as genre entertainment, sermonizing only in short bursts. A monologue about wounded male ego here, a funeral declaration there. Most of the runtime goes to territory maps and betrayals. Critics were unkind, audiences indifferent, and the box office was a bruise. Still, the organizing obsession, women seizing what their husbands left behind, is unmistakable and sustained. A somber vintage, well structured, faintly hollow on the finish.