The summer conversation is all about Toy Story 5 — which, per The Playlist, opened to $160 million this past weekend, the biggest of 2026 so far. Fine. But while that number swallows all the oxygen, A24 has a limited theatrical release quietly on the board that deserves more attention: Tony, Matt Johnson's film about a 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain stumbling into a Provincetown restaurant kitchen the summer that shapes the rest of his life.
The premise alone is a structural gamble. Bourdain biopics are a trap — the man spent his career building a persona so specific and so self-aware that any actor playing him risks either imitation or erasure. Johnson's solution, at least on paper, is to go early: catch the subject before the persona calcified, when he was still, by his own later account, "a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout." Dominic Sessa plays that version, with Leo Woodall and Antonio Banderas in support — a cast that suggests A24 is treating this as a real theatrical proposition, not a specialty afterthought.
The Formal Bet Is What Makes It Worth Watching
Johnson's previous work has been defined by formal restlessness — the mockumentary mode, the blurring of documentary and fiction. A kitchen-set coming-of-age film sounds like a departure toward the conventional, but the Letterboxd production page lists a 106-minute runtime that suggests something tighter and more disciplined than a prestige sprawl. The question the film has to answer is whether it earns the Bourdain name or just borrows it. A film about a famous person's formative years lives or dies on whether the specific texture of that person's later life feels genuinely seeded in what we're watching — or whether it's just a restaurant drama with a famous name attached in post.
The Criterion Channel's June slate is stacked with films about people becoming who they are (Marie Antoinette leads the month, alongside a deep LGBTQ+ retrospective and a collection of cinematic odysseys). That's coincidental programming, but it frames the moment well. Meanwhile, Neon has It Ends dated for August 21 — a reminder that the specialized release calendar is filling up fast and the window for a quiet limited release to find its audience keeps shrinking. Tony is in theaters now, in limited release, and it's the kind of bet — on a difficult subject, with a formally ambitious director — that this newsletter exists to track. Go find it before the algorithm decides it didn't happen.