‘Tony’
Directed by Matt Johnson (R)
★★★
Though the new Anthony Bourdain biopic is merely an amuse-bouche, it’s “a memorably tasty one,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. The movie covers only early chapters in the celebrity chef’s name-making memoir, Kitchen Confidential, and because it’s mere prologue to Bourdain’s New York City arrival and globe-hopping TV days, it’s “a tad slight.” Still, as it shows us a cocky but rudderless 19-year-old Bourdain falling hard for the rowdy life of the kitchen during a 1970s summer in Provincetown, Mass., “there’s a spontaneity and genuineness to Tony,” and its familiar coming-of-age story beats have an “endearing prickliness.”
Dominic Sessa is excellent in the lead role, said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Making good on the promise he showed in 2023’s The Holdovers, the young actor “nails the contradictory aspects of a slippery character.” When his broke Bourdain lucks into a job washing dishes at a seafood eatery, he’s torn between the hard-partying ways of an oyster shucker played by a terrific Leo Woodall and the focus shown by Antonio Banderas as the operation’s fatherly owner. The movie’s only weak link is an underdeveloped romantic subplot involving CODA’s Emilia Jones. For compensation, we get the “quiet miracle” of Banderas’ performance, said Dana Stevens in Slate. The older actor’s chemistry with Sessa “makes this gentle, low-stakes story simmer along like a cauldron of chowder.” Even if Tony weren’t a biopic about a food-world god who died too soon, “it would be a movie worth watching.”
‘Late Fame’
Directed by Kent Jones (Not rated)
★★★
Though the new Willem Dafoe movie is a modest little drama, it’s “also fairly heartbreaking,” said Tim Grierson in The A.V. Club. Dafoe plays Ed, a Manhattan postal worker well past 60 whose one book of poetry, written when he was young, has been rediscovered by a group of dandy 20-somethings who welcome him into their fold and encourage him to write again. While the movie “has its narrative stumbles, especially near the end,” Dafoe “has rarely been so tender, playing a man allowing himself to dream again for the first time in forever.”
The aging star is well paired here with Greta Lee, who plays Gloria, the literary circle’s only female member, said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Gloria is a cabaret singer and Lee “gives the vampish and self-consciously artificial character a magnetic inner life.” In fact, Lee and Dafoe are so good together that it’s a shame the rest of the young poetry devotees are mostly treated as ludicrous poseurs. “They’re ultimately too cartoonish for a film that otherwise feels so lived-in.” But this isn’t a mean movie, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. It’s an “affectionately told” story about “a certain sort of wistful foolishness,” the kind that grips some groups of young people generation after generation. Dafoe’s Ed just happens to be open-minded enough to enjoy being part of all that again.