Tony (2026)

Before Kitchen Confidential, television stardom, and a life spent eating his way around the world, Anthony Bourdain was simply Tony: an angry, aimless nineteen-year-old who still imagined his future lay somewhere other than a restaurant kitchen. Matt Johnson (BlackBerry) takes this formative moment as the subject of Tony, a loose, funny, and unexpectedly tender portrait of Bourdain during the summer of 1975, when the Vassar student follows a crush to Provincetown and stumbles into work at a chaotic seafood restaurant. Dominic Sessa captures the swagger and insecurity of a young man not yet certain what to do with either his appetite or his ambition, while Antonio Banderas plays the seasoned chef who begins initiating him into the discipline, camaraderie, and controlled chaos of professional cooking. Rather than attempting to encompass the mythology of Bourdain’s extraordinary life, Johnson concentrates on the moment before the legend took shape, when an aspiring writer entered a kitchen and, almost without realizing it, discovered the subject that would eventually give him his voice.