Tony (2026)
Directed by Matt Johnson
A 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain travels to Provincetown and stumbles into the chaotic world of a restaurant kitchen, setting off a summer that will shape the course of his life.
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What critics compared Tony to
It’s like The Bear on steroids.
Tony just feels like watching four mid-season episodes of The Bear without context, wondering why you’re watching these irritating people without a compelling reason to like them…
…practically laid the groundwork for stories like The Bear…
…they also take their work seriously, and the kitchen carries the pressure-cooker intensity of The Bear.
However, in the wake of recent shows like "The Bear" and films like "Marty Supreme," there is a sense that Johnson's film is, to use a popular food-related phrase, reheated nachos.
1975, Jaws at the drive-in theatre…
…a place that is pretty similar to Amity Island in Jaws, which is showing at every drive-in…
At one point, there’s even a scene featuring a drive-in theater screening JAWS.
…including allusions to Jaws and the stagnating 1970s…
If you're a fan of other period coming-of-age movies with killer soundtracks like The Wackness or Adventureland, Tony is going to be a tasty dish.
Still, the film's heart lies closer to coming-of-age stories like Adventureland (2009) and The Way, Way Back (2013)…
In visual style, tone, and structure, Tony is an entertaining, warm, hangout flick that feels spiritually aligned with Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!
It’s a feel-good guy movie in the vein of Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, another college period piece that similarly gazes backward in time while immersing you in its testosterone-drenched escapades…
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After all, most biopics are not-so-secretly odes to their subject's greatness, and that subtext has disturbingly become text in the wake of "Bohemian Rhapsody" and this year's "Michael."
This makes Tony closer in spirit to James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which peered into a relatively small window in Bob Dylan’s life, than Antoine Fuqua’s more expansive, Jackson estate-stamped Michael.
This makes Tony closer in spirit to James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which peered into a relatively small window in Bob Dylan’s life, than Antoine Fuqua’s more expansive, Jackson estate-stamped Michael.
Even James Mangold's underrated "A Complete Unknown" managed to subtextually weigh Bob Dylan's legacy against the couple years over which that movie takes place, while "Tony" and its look at Bourdain feels oddly too incomplete, even generic.
Inasmuch as Tony wants to be a scruffy, 1970s-style antihero drama, in the manner of The Last Detail or Scarecrow, it has the right face for it…
Inasmuch as Tony wants to be a scruffy, 1970s-style antihero drama, in the manner of The Last Detail or Scarecrow, it has the right face for it…
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In visual style, tone, and structure, Tony is an entertaining, warm, hangout flick that feels spiritually aligned with Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!
Banderas — in tune with Johnson’s allergy to anything that might resemble “Good Will Hunting” — gives Chef enough space to suggest that his life won’t be defined by teaching a young Anthony Bourdain how to shuck an oyster.