Set at a restaurant that caters to tourists in Times Square, Alonso Ruizpalacios’s La Cocina, adapted from Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play The Kitchen, revolves around Pedro (Raúl Briones), an undocumented Mexican line cook, and Julia (Rooney Mara), a white American working front of house. When $800 goes missing from the till, triggering an investigation by restaurant management, their love story derails. Throughout, Ruizpalacios allows the Grill to be both exactly what it is—a specific workplace with its own Kitchen Confidential-style rituals and pecking order—and a microcosm of American capitalism. “American” in the broadest sense since, as Pedro reminds us, “America is not a country.”

In an important scene, the Grill’s second-generation Mexican American manager, Luis (Eduardo Olmos), is interrogating Pedro, whom he suspects of having stolen the money to pay for the abortion that Julia wants and, coincidentally, would cost $800. While the intransigent line cook sidesteps Luis...