Flamin' Hot

Flamin' Hot (2023) is Eva Longoria's biographical drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. A Frito-Lay janitor dreams up the snack that rewires a country's taste buds.

Richard Montañez (Jesse Garcia) grew up hustling in a Mexican American neighborhood, bouncing between odd jobs until he landed a mop-and-bucket gig on a chip factory floor. No MBA, barely able to follow the company memos. What he did have was an instinct for the heat missing from every bag on the shelf, the chili-and-lime fire of the street vendors he grew up with. He pitched spicy Cheetos straight past the corporate ladder, with almost no one inside the company willing to take him seriously. His wife Judy (Annie Gonzalez) believes in him harder than he believes in himself.

Longoria's directing debut treats this as a story about heritage and stubborn nerve, about how one community's culture ends up inside a mass-market product. Tony Shalhoub and Dennis Haysbert play the executives holding the idea's fate. It doesn't sand the man into a saint, and it's all the more rousing for it. Stream Flamin' Hot (2023) online on iFILM.