60
The work is a brutal rite of passage that will click with anybody who has put it all out there and lost once, twice or thrice. And still got up to face the music again.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
70
Chicago Reader by Andrea Gronvall
The behind-the-scenes access to professional kitchens, the intricacy of the desserts, the venerable traditions, and above all the camaraderie and respect the chefs extend each other reveal the craftsmen at their civilized best; think of this movie as the antidote to Gordon Ramsay.
85
Kings of Pastry is about the craft, the teaching and learning, the collaborative work, the tedium, the heartbreak and emotional backbone it takes to make something lovely, even if that something is destined to disappear down a gullet in seconds - and even if the maker ends up a noble failure.
75
Kings of Pastry, goes inside an intense event that few Americans know much about - a kind of tradesmen's Olympics.
90
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
The French, no one needs to be told, take food and food preparation with extreme seriousness. "There are no 'all-you-can eat' places in France," one chef sniffs in this excellent Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker documentary. "The idea is to eat small amounts of the best food."
50
Village Voice by Melissa Anderson
Most of the culinary footage is devoted to documenting-in flat, dull DV-the finalists' piece montée, or "sugar showpiece," in which sucrose is manipulated for its chemical properties, and dessert becomes a weird, often tacky sculpture.
70
The New York Times by Mike Hale
The film builds in interest and intrigue as it goes along, helped immeasurably by the directors' choice - canny or fortunate or both - of the astonishingly good-natured and likable Jacquy Pfeiffer, an Alsace-born, Chicago-based chef, as their chief protagonist.
58
In a pressure-cooker environment, Pennebaker and Hegedus' moderately engaging but ultimately unsatisfying documentary feels disappointingly lukewarm.