Soul Kitchen is a puzzle. Everything that happens in the film has a correspondence in the story. Nothing happens just for the sake of it, even though some pieces do not fit in the big picture, they are still there to serve the full purpose of the film, and this makes overall image of Soul Kitchen positive. It is a story of a man who is in love with his restaurant. He is in the center of the film and everything else happens around him. His name is Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos) and he owns a restaurant which is completely made by him. He has a brother in jail for robbery who can go outside during the day if he has a place to work. Zinos is in love with Nadine (Pheline Roggan) and Nadine goes to Shanghai with her work as a journalist and Zinos plans to rent his restaurant and move to Shanghai with his girlfriend but funny and tragicomic events don't leave him alone. Every event and person is related to Zinos. This is the reason why I said he is in the center of the film. Soul kitchen is based on his own experiences as the restaurant owner of a Greek Taverna. The director of the film Fatih Akin was a regular customer in that restaurant and this is how Soul Kitchen is born. This story is even more interesting than the film itself.Soul Kitchen is a typical festival film with its atmosphere and story. It is not carrying a message and it doesn't try to give you anything. As I said, it is the story of a guy who is in love with his restaurant. Soul Kitchen is the rise and fall and rebirth of the restaurant with the same name. It has food, alcohol, music, dance and sex in it. It has good people and bad people in it. In the story point of view, it is not perfect and it has a lot of flaws. Zinos' brother is a thief because sometime during the film they will need to steal something, Nadine's grandmother dies and leaves a lot of money to Nadine because in the end of the film, Zinos will need a lot of money to get his restaurant back. He is having a back injury because he is supposed to fall in love with the therapist. The chief of a restaurant loses his job while Zinos is around, because he is supposed to come and work for Zinos. These pieces are needed in the story to make it a whole. This is the beauty of Soul Kitchen. A piece of random information is used during the film to combine something or to make a point. Soul Kitchen is a bad restaurant with good music. Zinos' restaurant is sued by the authorities of all kinds, and Fatih Akin takes these incidences and uses them to show the corruption of the system as well. Soul Kitchen is not intended to be a comedy, but everything that is happening in the film is comedy. Watching Soul Kitchen is like watching life. You don't force anything to happen, they just happen. These are sometimes good, sometimes bad. They are not exaggerated, that's why you get to think that Soul Kitchen is the life itself. The only difference from the real life is some puzzle pieces are re-shaped to fit in the story. This might be the only bad thing about the film. The film has a large cast of European actors, but there is not even one performance worth mentioning. Everything is simple and natural. That's why I said above that watching Soul Kitchen is like watching the life itself.There is not much to talk about the film. It is not made for any purpose. Fatih Akin and Adam Bousdoukos' longtime friendship is the only reason of this production. It is like a friend of yours takes a camera in his hand and records your daily life and makes a film out of those shots. Fatih Akin, as a director, is much better than that, but this doesn't apply for Soul Kitchen. In my opinion Soul Kitchen is made purely for fun. This film is a great memory of this friendship. If you want to judge Fatih Akin as a director you should watch, Head On or The Edge of Heaven or In July. Fatih Akin is a talented director, just don't judge him if Soul Kitchen is the first and the only film you have seen made by him. There are two good points of the film. One is the music, and second is the natural flow of the story. Soul Kitchen is completely in German language and has a runtime of 99 minutes. Every character has their own flaws and this makes the film natural. Released on 2009, Soul Kitchen has even received a special prize in Venice Film Festival.

Soul Kitchen (2009) German comedy Slow start but at midway through, With that jazz and soul, We're whisked away by misfits, Fun, tasty, redemptive ride. Tanka, literally "short poem", is a form of poetry consisting of five lines, unrhymed, with the 5-7-5-7-7 syllable format. #Tanka #PoemReview

This film started so well that it was beginning to look like a hidden gem, a classic in the making. I give this film 5 stars out of 10, but I have to say that the 5 stars are for the first 30 minutes, which were so well done. The remaining 60 minutes deserve a zero.The comedy is not funny. Slapstick and cheap laughs. Everything is so predictable that we were trying to take bets on the story in the middle of the film, but no one wanted to take any bets. We were all on the same page and guess what? Every single thing we predicted happened. Predicting one thing or another is fine, but not everything. The movie just drags and drags without direction. You're not sure if it's a story of two Greek brothers, a story of a couple, a story of another couple or a story of a restaurant and a rag-tag team of staff that turn a failure around.Everything is so contrived you wouldn't believe it. Sometimes in life you can make decisions or take actions that COULD lead to something bad happening. There is that risk in life. But in this film characters take "chances" that almost guarantee an unwanted event. As in, the director wants this event to happen so he has to find a sure-fire way to make it happen. So the characters take actions to ensure this event, even though it is not in their personality to do so. The expression Americans now use is "because script." People do things that don't make any logical sense in their world, but it makes sense "because script" says so. There was also one bit of incredibly amateur screen writing - a character in another country knew a piece of information that (s)he could not have known in real life (unless they had access to the script somehow!).The music scenes are too long, some reviewers say "the female characters are flat and without depth" - well you gotta take a closer look at the male characters, friends, because they're cardboard caricatures just the same.The cinematography and camera work were really good. Locations too. But you can't get too many points for that.It's a wanna-be feel-good movie that fails terribly at making you feel good or at entertaining you in most ways. Hopefully someone takes the idea from the first 30 minutes and does something else with it.

Toned down a bit in the sex and drugs area this could probably make a terrific kids film. It's a very obvious, ham-fisted fairy tale, which moves at a cracking pace, and rejoices in cartoon characters, plotting and visuals. That's not to say that kids only like their entertainment ham- fisted, but Soul Kitchen is a very basic romp, in which most of the cast are way over the top, and enjoying themselves enormously - often more than the audience. One of the major problems for me is that Herr Bleibtreu simply isn't funny. And there's too much of him not being funny, and not being - even for an instant - credibly Greek. It's good to see Udo Keir in a minor role, and being commendably restrained (what else could he do - surrounded by all the scenery chewing and eye-popping from his colleagues?) Nevertheless, this is a very well- meant 5 course meal, with lashings of sauce. You may wish that some of the jokes could not have been quite so overcooked, but you'll not leave the cinema bloated.