Weekend Film Reviews: 'Tony,' 'One Night Only'

Anthony Bourdain swears that he used to be unlikeable. That’s hard to believe for many fans of the late celebrity chef, but he wrote frankly about that period of his life in his best-selling memoir, Kitchen Confidential. The biopic Tony looks at the year he spent in Provincetown, Massachusetts, learning how to show up to work on time and, slowly, how to cook. His brattiness is key to the success of the movie, according to William Bibbiani, film critic for the Wrap. Tony is “not all about how amazing the subject was,” he says, adding that “what makes it work is how unafraid Dominic Sessa is to be unlikeable as a character who, later in life, we would pretty much all like.” It’s unclear if Bourdain would have liked the movie, though. “Anthony Bourdain had a complicated relationship to his own celebrity, and the movie probably has a complicated relationship to that as well,” says Alissa Wilkinson, film critic for the New York Times. Bibbiani and Wilkinson also review One Night Only, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, and White Nights.