Tony (2026)

Director: Matt Johnson

Cast: Dominic Sessa, Emilia Jones, Stavros Halkias, Antonio Banderas

Have I Seen It Before: Never.

Did I Like It: A biopic is mostly going to depend on your view of the subject. If you never thought Andy Kaufman was funny in life, then Man on the Moon (1999) isn’t going to work for you. If you never got any joy out of b movies, you will confront Ed Wood (1994) with a certain amount of, “who cares?” If you think pornography is the knifes edge of the decline of Western Civilization (and view the decline of Western Civilization as a bad thing), then I’m not sure what you’re doing here, but I’m also fairly sure that The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) is the film for you*.

Here, things are a little different. You might not be what might reductively be called a “foodie” (if you’ve ordered Fries from a speaker in the last 24 hours, like I have, you may not qualify), and so Anthony Bourdain (Sessa) may not mean much to you. Alternatively, you might be so consciously aware of the food you take in that you might make an ethical choice to be a vegetarian. Bourdain wasn’t terribly fond of that, either, although the reasons are a little more complicated than I am painting them

In short, no matter how you might view food, you may have had occasion to view Bourdain as a jerk. And as played by Sessa in this film, he is a jerk. He’s 19, so that might be a given. But you kind of like the kid, even as he does horrible things to the people around him and only haltingly finds himself. Antonio Banderas as his unnamed culinary Jiminy Cricket is providing what might yet be a career-best performance. The supporting cast is delightful, even when they are being terrible.

In short, the movie transcends its subject matter, along with the constraints of a biopic, and becomes a vital, believable coming-of-age story. The greatest praise I can heap upon it? I actually want to read Kitchen Confidential, and hear more from Bourdain after watching it.

*Not for nothing that all three of those films share production crew, and indeed some share identical credits.

The Holdovers (2023)

Director: Alexander Payne

Cast: Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa, Carrie Preston

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Kicked myself for missing it in the theaters, but Peacock is always there to pick up my self-imposed slack.

Did I Like It: I’ve been struck in recent years, and damn near feel like I’ve been choking on it in recent months, but somewhere along the line we absolutely lost all conception of what nostalgia means. I can’t remember the last time I went through any range of social media posts without some post algorithmically recommended to me that insisted the era in which Wendy’s served all of their food was the absolute pinnacle of western civilization*. Nothing was inherently better in those times; you were just younger then and weren’t terribly bothered by just how screwed up the world could already occasionally be.

That’s all to say that this film feels like perhaps the only object in years to understand the power of that wistful feeling we once properly identified as nostalgia. From its first moments dusting off the Universal logos that died with Back to the Future - Part III (1990) through opening credits that most people would see on TCM, the film manages to feel like a film that could have been released in some bygone year.

All of that is hard enough to do and more than enough to recommend the film. But it goes deeper than that. I may have never lived at a New England boarding school, but I did have a stunted view towards Christmas, and at least one teacher who might have thought I was bright but a little bit of a pain in the ass. There may be funnier Oscar contenders this year, but this one feels the most right.

*First of all, it wasn’t all that long ago. At least I don’t think it was…