Tony Reaches Behind the Bravado to a Different Anthony Bourdain

What our food critic thought of the new Anthony Bourdain biopic

Based on Anthony Bourdain's famous memoir, "Tony" takes a lot of liberties that don't make a lot of sense, Bethany Jean Clement writes in her review.

Anthony Bourdain’s life doesn’t sizzle in ‘Tony’

During the waning days of the press tour for “The Odyssey,” Christopher Nolan gave a surprisingly in-depth and frank interview with Chinese podcast host Zhong Shu. As part of the discussion, Nolan expressed one of his annoyances with modern film criticism: the tendency to gamify the experience of watching a film. Many audiences have an insecure need to be one step ahead of the story, as if knowing what’s going to happen before it happens is the …

Tony reaches behind the bravado to a different Anthony Bourdain

Loosely based on Anthony Bourdain's memoir Kitchen Confidential, Tony sees the future legend mess up his first gig in a commercial kitchen.

The "formative years biopic" is just as bad as its broader cousin

Biopics face a serious and often unresolvable contradiction. Their audience is built upon name recognition, but the eternal cultural currency of celebrity is mitigated by a passé genre with a reputation for lazy, exploitative, and inert works. It’s no small thing to film the story of a leader, activist, or artist with a large following (and thus a large likelihood of backlash), especially if they died prematurely and tragically. Tony—the first f…