YNOT at the Movies

Some directors fall in love with a landscape and forget to introduce us to the people standing in it. That's the trouble at the center of "Arsa" (Italy 2024 | in Italian | 93 min.), the first traditionally plotted narrative feature from Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni, who work together under the name MASBEDO. A decade after their vignette-driven "The Lack" (2014), the pair are now working with a single throughline and a script, but the film is so besotted with its volcanic island setting and its lead actress that the story feels like an afterthought bolted onto the postcards.

Arsa (Gala Martinucci) is a strong young woman who has constructed a solitary world for herself in a rundown hovel on the edge of the island, working as its unofficial groundskeeper, wading into the reeds to collect plastic and debris that wash up along the shore. She has learned to see the world through the lens of imagination rather than fact, a habit inherited from her late father (Lino Musella), a sculptor who spent his life bending toward the "pretend beautiful" statues that a cynical patron (Tommaso Ragno) demanded of him, and who left Arsa with fairy tales instead of financial security.

That inheritance is what makes the film's dreamiest passages work. Arsa dives underwater again and again, chasing a bronze statue half-buried in the sand, and Gherardo Gossi's camera lingers on her pale skin against the black volcanic rock and darker water with a tenderness that borders on reverence. It's genuinely moving to watch her reach for a hand that isn't hers to hold, faint, and drift in the depths.

The trouble starts on dry ground. When Andrea (Jacopo Olmo Antinori) arrives with two friends, Pietro (Giovanni Cannata) and Tommaso (Luca Chikovani), to rent a holiday home, Arsa feels her solitary world has been violated. Andrea is spellbound by her all the same, drawn toward a person he slowly realizes he can't actually reach. The problem is that neither character is given much beyond that premise. Andrea is sad about his own father, Arsa is enigmatic, and the film assumes that stating those facts is the same as dramatizing them. Their pull toward each other plays out mostly in glances and silence, which is a defensible choice for a film this interested in mood, but it leaves long stretches where nothing much accumulates. Scenes drift into one another the way memories do, which suits the film's ambition, but the editing by Jacopo Quadri doesn't always give the audience a foothold for where in Arsa's timeline, or her mind, we've arrived.

It doesn't help that the film's visual grammar leans so heavily on close-ups of Martinucci's face and body that other characters start to feel like set dressing. Yet the strange result is that all that proximity doesn't add up to intimacy. Arsa stays a surface the camera studies rather than a person the audience comes to know, and by the film's final stretch, she's exactly as much of a mystery as she was in the opening shot. Musella, an actor capable of real specificity, is mostly asked to embody a storyteller in flashback, present to hand Arsa the fairy tales and the "pretend beautiful" statues she carries into adulthood, rather than play a person in his own right. Ragno's patron barely registers as more than a plot device for Arsa's backstory. The film clearly believes that its images can carry the emotional weight its script doesn't supply, and sometimes they do. But a shot of skin against black sand, however striking, isn't a substitute for a compelling story.

MASBEDO come from visual art and moving-image installation, and it shows, in the film's strengths and in its blind spots alike. This film has a strong eye and very little patience for narrative mechanics, which makes it a frustrating fit for a feature-length running time. There's a genuinely strange, haunting film buried somewhere in its underwater dream sequences—what surrounds them is a story that never quite closes the distance it opens up with its audience, including, in the end, the distance to its own protagonist.

"Arsa" opens in theaters on Friday, September 18, 2026.

Six hundred years on, the 1381 The Peasants' Revolt still hasn't loosened its grip on the public imagination, and director Paul Greengrass is only the latest to try to bring it to the big screen, this time with a camera that moves like it's still trying to keep up with the mob.

Written, directed, and produced by Greengrass, "The Uprising" (U.K./Germany/U.S. 2026 | 128 min.) marks his first true period piece. In England, 1381, the Black Death has wiped out half the population, and the boy king's council answers the resulting grief with a poll tax. Ploughman (Andrew Garfield), a farmer who has already lost his family to the plague, intervenes when tax collectors turn violent, and that single act of resistance snowballs into tens of thousands marching on London.

The rebels reach the banks of River Thames, expecting to negotiate with 14-year-old King Richard II (Woody Norman); when his terrified council pulls him back at the last second, the crowd storms London instead. Once inside, the rebels hunt down the officials they hold responsible for the tax, the king's promises of amnesty prove hollow, and the uprising curdles into exactly the kind of bloodshed it rose up against.

Among the rebels, John Ball (Jamie Bell) is the preacher with an evangelist's hunger, Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) gives the rebellion its blunt forward motion, and Alyce (Thomasin McKenzie), a character invented for the film, stands in for the women who marched alongside the men.

On the crown's side, Treasurer Hales (Tom Hollander) and Archbishop Sudbury (Stephen Dillane) hold the real power behind the throne, Mayor Walworth (Jonny Lee Miller) gives London's merchant class a wary self-interest, and the Countess (Katherine Waterston), Richard's mother, is desperate for her son to rise to the authority the crown demands of him.

The film's real find is the Scribe (Sky Yang), who moves easily between the king's court and the rebel camp, a kind of go-between no one else in the story gets to be. It's a terrific performance, and the Scribe emerges as the closest thing the film has to a conscience.

Garfield doesn't smile once across the film's runtime, and that choice reads less like a limitation than a decision Ploughman has already made before the story even starts. He's a man carrying two griefs at once, the family behind him and the tax collector in front of him, and both stay visible on his face throughout. Norman gets the harder assignment: King Richard II starts the film as a terrified boy in a room full of men older and crueler than him and ends it cold enough to order executions without flinching, and Norman charts that shift almost entirely without dialogue.

Every interior in this film feels dark, grim, and lifeless, and the effect builds a real sense of dread around institutions that are supposed to represent order. Production designer Nikolaj Danielsen turned Nuremberg's St. Sebaldus Church into a working set, and cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth shoots every council chamber and cathedral like it's been sealed off from daylight for six hundred years. The costume work is its own achievement; the sheer volume of period-accurate clothing this production needed for tens of thousands of extras is staggering to consider, and the designers reportedly leaned on 3D-printed textiles just to keep pace with the shoot.

The film's believability slips over the mechanics of the rebellion itself. Wat Tyler and Ploughman address armies of thousands in open fields with no amplification available to fourteenth-century England, and the crowds cheer back as if every word carried clean to the rear of the field. It's the kind of small thing that pulls you out of an otherwise immersive picture right when the crowd scenes need you leaning in rather than doing the math.

Greengrass has made this kind of film before, staging chaos so it reads as legible rather than merely loud, in "Bloody Sunday" (2002) and "Captain Phillips" (2013). "The Uprising" is the biggest and bluntest version of that instinct yet, and its politics are current on purpose: a population wrecked by plague, furious at a government that failed it, marching on the people who rule them. In this film, he tells that six-hundred-year-old story about disease, grief, and fury at the people in charge, to an audience that just lived through another pandemic.

"The Uprising" opens in theaters on Friday, September 11, 2026.

Most documentary subjects sit still long enough for a film to catch up to them, but director Sam Green picked one that never does. The world's oldest living person is a title that changes hands usually every few months, sometimes even just a few days, an odd thing to build a film around on its face, but he found something bigger inside it than the novelty suggests, and spent a decade chasing it anyway. "The Oldest Person in the World" (United States 2026 | 87 min. | Documentary) turns that impossibility into its whole reason for being.

The premise is simple enough to explain in a sentence: every time the world's oldest living person dies, the title passes to someone else, and that handoff makes global news. Green latches onto the phenomenon and decides to meet each new record holder in person, starting in 2015 with Susannah Mushatt Jones, a 116-year-old Brooklyn resident known to her family as Miss Susie, who Green films alongside her 86-year-old niece. From there the film hops the globe.

In Italy, Emma Morano, 116, sings a song from her youth and offers her secret to longevity with a wink. In Jamaica, Violet Mosse-Brown, also 116, recites a poem from memory that she learned more than a century before the camera arrived. In the south of France, a nun named Sister André, 117, jokes that God "has some nerve" for keeping her alive this long. Outside Barcelona, Maria Branyas, 116 herself, holds the title while maintaining a Twitter account and shrugging the whole thing off as no big deal. The film also touches on Kane Tanaka, who held the record for nearly four years into her late 110s, and closes on the current titleholder, 117-year-old Ethel Caterham in the United Kingdom.

What keeps the film from being a curiosity reel of extreme old age is what Green threads around it. He turns the camera on his own son, Atlas, born the same year filming began, using the boy as a kind of counterweight to the supercentenarians on the other end of life. He also brings in his own health scare and the death of his younger brother, working through both in conversation with his 92-year-old mother. The structure recalls "Seven Up!" (1964), returning to subjects over years to watch time do its work on them, except here the through-line isn't a fixed group of people but whoever happens to be holding the title when Green shows up with a camera.

It's a genuinely intriguing structure for a documentary, and Green deserves credit for finding an angle into a subject that could have just been a gimmick. But watching it is harder than the premise suggests. Most of these subjects are past their 116th birthday, and it shows. Several are barely mobile, confined to wheelchairs, their bodies worn down by more than a century of living to the point that it's uncomfortable to look at for long stretches. The film doesn't shy away from that reality, but it also doesn't give you much room to look away either. It left the audience turning over a question the film never quite answers directly: what's the value of living that long if you can no longer function on your own? Longevity and quality of life aren't the same thing, and the gap between them sits at the center of nearly every scene, whether the film means to put it there or not.

The other frustration is one of omission. Green will introduce a moment, a health crisis, a family rift, a subject's death, and then move past it without following through on what actually happened. It's clearly intentional, in keeping with the film's loose, life-as-it-comes structure, but it left the audience wanting more than a few times, wishing he'd stayed in a scene a beat longer instead of cutting away.

"The Oldest Person in the World" opens in New York on Thursday, September 10, 2026, then in Bay Area and Los Angeles theaters on Friday, September 18, 2026, before expanding nationwide throughout the fall.

As a Massachusetts courtroom tries to establish that Lindsay Clancy, on trial for killing her three children, was too mentally ill to be held responsible for it, director Jessica Earnshaw's "Baby Doe" (U.S.A. 2025 | 100 min. | Documentary) follows another mother on trial for killing her baby who gets no such defense. Gail Ritchey is a grandmother, a churchgoer, a suspect in a thirty-year-old death. The film would rather sit with her contradictions than resolve them.

The film opens on a cold case breaking open. In 1993, Ritchey gave birth alone in rural Geauga County, Ohio, and left the newborn in the woods. She says the baby was stillborn. Decades later, genealogical DNA testing identifies her as the mother, and Ritchey, now a suburban wife and grandmother, is arrested for murder.

This is Earnshaw's second documentary feature. Her first, "Jacinta" (2020), followed a woman recently released from prison trying to rebuild a relationship with her young daughter. Both films stay close to a mother moving through the justice system without losing sight of the family caught up in it. Earnshaw spends most of her runtime here with Ritchey at home rather than in court. Her husband Mark and their adult children, Evan and Courtney, appear less as witnesses building a defense than as a family trying to hold a shape they no longer recognize. Ritchey's mother Nancy and her friend Patty, a pastor's wife, round out the picture of the conservative Christian community that shaped Ritchey's life, the same community now forced to reckon with what Ritchey is accused of. Defense attorney Steven Bradley and trial consultant Paul Jepsen work the legal machinery around her. Prosecutors Nick Burling and Jim Flaiz, and Geauga County Sheriff Scott Hildenbrand, represent a system with far less patience for ambiguity.

What the film does not do is treat guilty or innocent as its focal point. A true crime documentary usually withholds the truth of what happened until the end. This film isn't interested in that kind of suspense. It gives Ritchey's account early and often. It spends its remaining time on a harder problem instead: whether a sympathetic woman can also be a woman who did something unforgivable. A judge in the film says he cannot try to rationalize the two Ritcheys, the one on trial and the one who raised three children in a church pew. That's precisely the project Earnshaw has taken on: building sympathy for Ritchey while never resolving whether she should be forgiven for what happened. Those two impulses pull against each other for most of the film's runtime.

Religion runs under every scene without ever getting named as the film's real subject. Ritchey's community treated an unmarried pregnancy as a catastrophe, and that judgment was enough to make her hide the pregnancy from everyone around her, including herself. Thirty years of prayer and repentance haven't undone what that silence produced. The film names the condition directly: unperceived pregnancy, in which a person in crisis dissociates from a pregnancy entirely. Unlike Clancy's case, though, nobody in the documentary argues that Ritchey didn't know what she was doing. What they argue, instead, is that shame did the deciding for her.

That refusal to diagnose is the film's most interesting choice and also its most frustrating one. Earnshaw clearly believes the true cause of what happened to Ritchey sits somewhere in the intersection of purity culture, isolation, and a justice system with no mechanism for nuance. But she never says so outright. She lets sympathy stand in for analysis instead. The result is a film that makes you feel for Ritchey without ever forcing you to reckon with what put her there. It's an unsatisfying kind of mercy, extended to the film's own argument as much as to its subject.

"Baby Doe" begins streaming digitally Thursday, September 17, 2026, after a festival run last year and a subsequent theatrical release.

The Czech-born Jewish German-language writer Franz Kafka spent his life feeling like an outsider in his own story, and Academy Award nominee Agnieszka Holland's new biopic "Franz" (Czech Republic/Poland/Germany/France/Turkey 2025 | in German/Czech | 127 min.) never quite lets an audience feel otherwise. The director once turned a Jewish teenager's survival inside the Hitler Youth into the wrenching "Europa Europa" (1990). Her latest film turns to a subject who never had to hide from anyone but himself. The picture has become a genuine sensation back home, sweeping nominations at this year's Czech Lion Awards. Holland deserves credit for attempting a fractured, non-chronological portrait instead of a conventional cradle-to-grave biopic, even if that ambition rarely catches fire on screen.

Franz Kafka (Idan Weiss) is sketched here as a mosaic rather than a linear biography, hopping between his prickly, impulsive youth under the roof of his domineering father Hermann (Peter Kurth) and his adult years fumbling through love affairs and a day job he despised. There are stretches where that fragmented approach genuinely captures a man who never experienced his own life as a tidy narrative. But the film keeps reaching past even that structure, cutting forward again into the present day to show tourists filing through the Kafka museum, and the seams between eras show. It's a clever idea in theory. In practice it undercuts the very gravity the film is trying to build, since it has to keep borrowing from Kafka's modern fandom to convince us the man mattered in the first place.

The bigger problem is Tomasz Naumiuk's camera, which treats a dinner table scene like something to be swung through rather than composed. It whips from face to face with a restlessness that reads as disorienting more often than expressive, and by the second act the constant movement becomes exhausting rather than immersive. Combined with a Kafka who is written as difficult to warm to on purpose, eccentric, impulsive, and often unlikeable, the film has trouble giving an audience anywhere to land.

Weiss commits fully to that prickliness, and there's a real performance buried in his fidgeting, wounded stares. But a biopic that keeps its subject at arm's length needs either a formal control the camerawork doesn't have, or a magnetism the writing doesn't give him.

What's stranger still is how little the film is interested in the words that made Kafka worth a movie at all. For a story about a writer, the film spends almost no time asking why the writing mattered, what made it strange, or why it outlived him. Watching it feels like picking up a handsome mug at the museum shop as a souvenir: proof that you were there, without any real understanding of the writer or his work, and why Franz's name is on the mug.

"Franz" opens in the San Francisco Bay Area theaters on Friday, August 21, 2026.

A family spends ninety-nine minutes running through the same neighborhood yelling each other's names, and that's about as far as the imagination goes in writer-director David Robert Mitchell's ridiculous "The End of Oak Street" (USA 2026 | 99 min.).

A mysterious cosmic event rips Oak Street from suburbia and drops it somewhere prehistoric, dinosaurs start hunting the residents, and a family sprints from house to house while shouting for each other. That's the whole movie. The setup owes an obvious debt to "Poltergeist" (1982), a suburban household under siege by forces the script can't be bothered to explain, and the chase mechanics are lifted wholesale from "Jurassic Park" (1993) without any of that film's patience for staging or geography.

Set in 1982, Denise (Anne Hathaway) and her husband Greg (Ewan McGregor) are dealing with a marriage going stale, while their daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) and son Brian (Christian Convery) feel the tension building at home. None of that family drama survives the plot. Once the portal opens and the dinosaurs show up, the movie stops being about a family and starts being about four people running in the same general direction while something with teeth follows behind. Even the basic logic of the threat goes unexamined: species that would have spent their actual lives grazing behave here like uniform killing machines, because the film needs bodies chased and doesn't care to sort out which prehistoric animals would plausibly be doing the chasing.

That flattening extends to the way danger gets telegraphed. You can clock which side of the frame a dinosaur is about to enter from a beat before it happens, and the jump scares arrive on a schedule regular enough to set a watch to. The family somehow never catches on, running past the same blind corners scene after scene as if they haven't lived through the previous four ambushes. A movie this repetitive needs either surprise or craft to cover for it, and it has neither. Even the creatures themselves appear generic, despite a visual effects team with award-nominated blockbuster work behind them and a director's intention of wanting the dinosaurs to feel like real animals.

The performances don't do much to rescue any of it. Hathaway and McGregor are both better than this material, and it shows in how strained their line readings get whenever the script asks them to sell a moment of marital heartbreak seconds before pivoting to a monster attack. Stella and Convery, playing teenagers thrown into mortal danger, mostly register as scared kids yelling directions at each other, which is a fair description of most of their screen time. None of it reads as embarrassing so much as unsupported: there's nowhere for these actors to build a character when every scene resets the tension to the same pitch. The result is a cast working hard for a movie that never lets them go anywhere.

This movie wants credit for scale and doesn't earn it on execution. Nearly every beat is visible a full scene ahead of when it arrives, and a premise this odd deserved more than a family retracing the same neighborhood over and over.

"The End of Oak Street" opens in theaters on Friday, August 14, 2026.

It takes four people to send a single letter across an ocean: the writer, the scribe, the reader, the listener. Somewhere inside that fragile chain, director Lan Hongchun created one of the year's most unexpected box-office phenomena, "Dear You" (给阿嬷的情书 | China 2026 | in Teochew | 118 min.), a melodrama that never once feels manufactured, so heart-wrenchingly devastating and unapologetically sentimental throughout that hardly anyone leaves dry-eyed.

Xiaowei (Zheng Runqi), buried in debt, goes digging through his grandmother's attic during her 88th birthday party and finds the return address on a stack of qiaopi, the letters and remittances overseas Chinese laborers sent home, part of a correspondence system old enough to be inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. The letters were sent by his grandfather, Zheng Musheng (Wang Yantong), who left for Malaysia and Thailand when his grandmother, Ye Shurou (Wu Shaoqing), was still young and raising three kids alone. Shurou stops writing back in 1978, after a photo arrives showing Musheng with Xie Nanzhi (Li Sitong) and children she doesn't recognize. She assumes it's proof of a second family, built while she waited. Xiaowei heads to Bangkok hoping his rich, absent grandfather can bail him out. What he finds instead is a story about loyalty, sacrifice, generosity, and gratitude that has nothing to do with money.

That story is where the film resonates the most. It's the almost-forgotten practice at the center of it, one that shaped generations of immigrants and the families they left behind, that makes the story unique and profoundly moving. The nostalgic recreation of that vanished mid-century diaspora world is remarkable; every set piece feels like it was built to be lived in, not photographed.

Where the film falters is in what it leaves out and what it adds. The comedy bolted onto Xiaowei's present-day search is a bit forced, and it undercuts the gravity of what's unfolding in the flashbacks. More glaring is the omission: the script never makes the effort to reckon with how dangerous an overseas connection was during the Cultural Revolution, or how Shurou and her family actually survived carrying that risk. Zhang Yimou has spent a career sitting inside exactly that kind of danger; a film willing to go there might have hit even harder.

Wu Shaoqing plays Shurou's decades of believing her husband betrayed her, without ever letting them harden her into someone cold or vindictive. Li Sitong, playing Xie Nanzhi, makes what could have been a one-note "other woman" figure into someone with her own claim on sympathy. Wang Yantong is the film's emotional center as Zheng Musheng, a husband who spends a lifetime far from home carrying nothing but a big heart and the conviction that he can build his wife and kids a better life once he returns. It's a performance that makes the letters land the way they do, patient, generous, never once playing for pity.

In the end, this is a tribute to a generation whose devotion meant giving up everything for a family they might never see again, and it's hard to imagine walking out of it unmoved.

"Dear You" opens in theaters on Friday, September 4, 2026.

Outlaw sex out of marriage for 364 days a year and you don't get a cautionary tale, you get a farce, and that math is exactly what director Will Gluck is counting on. His "One Night Only" (USA 2026 | 102 min.) never explains how a law this drastic gets passed, enforced or tolerated, and it doesn't much want to. That's both the film's best trick and its biggest liability. Treated as a pure engine for chaos, the Mandate works. Treated as a premise an audience is supposed to sit with for a full runtime, it starts to feel less like a bold conceit and more like an excuse the script never bothers to earn.

The Mandate is the setup: sex outside marriage is illegal, except for one twelve-hour window a year, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., when the whole country gets released at once. Once the clock hits 7, the switch flips, and this version of New York City starts to resemble the scale and abandon of San Francisco's Folsom Street Fair, streets packed with people who've spent a year saving up for this. The world-building is where the film is at its sharpest: protest signage everywhere, "repeal," "f*ck the mandate," pro- and anti-Mandate messaging stenciled in English, Spanish and Chinese to make the city actually feel like New York and not just a backdrop. There are posted signs in the subway to the effect of scouting world wide and flirting locally, the kind of sight gag that's more clever than most of the film's actual dialogue.

Into that chase go Allie (Monica Barbaro) and Owen (Callum Turner). Owen goes into the night still attached to his girlfriend Malika (Maya Hawke), planning to propose, only to find out she means to spend her one night with someone else instead. That discovery is what turns him into a single man, right as the Mandate clock starts ticking, not some tidy breakup that happened offscreen before the movie began. Allie, meanwhile, is trying to want something real instead of just checking a box. Every time the two of them are pulled apart by a new complication, from a flirtatious bartender named Skye (Julia Fox) to whatever mess Owen stumbles into next, the film has them ask the same question out loud: how do we keep running into each other? It's a self-aware shrug rather than an actual answer, and it works exactly once. By the third or fourth coincidence, the joke has done its job and the film keeps leaning on it anyway.

The film fills the space between those collisions with side business that's hit-or-miss. Owen's mother Linda (Molly Ringwald) and her boyfriend Rick (LeVar Burton) get a subplot pitched at the same broad register as everything else, and it's the kind of detour that's fun in the moment but does nothing to build toward the ending.

The production clearly poured more imagination into dressing the world than into interrogating it. Nobody in the story seems angry, frightened or genuinely inconvenienced by living under a law this invasive, which might be the point Gluck's going for, that people adapt to anything, but it also drains the premise of any real friction. There are sloppy moments scattered through the film that have nothing to do with whether the Mandate itself is believable, like a funny enough bit where Allie breaks into an impromptu dance number for one of her pharmaceutical jingles, but you're still left wondering how in the world two people climb to an unmanned lighthouse to watch the sunrise, or dance in the middle of the street like that, in a city where even a bathroom stays locked.

Withholding the obvious love-at-first-sight beat between Owen and Allie is a smart choice, and their chemistry mostly justifies it. But by the later stretch of the film, the same tug-of-war stops building tension and starts feeling repetitive. The Mandate is a better joke than the movie built around it, funny enough for a summer night out, loose enough that it won't stick with you much past the credits.

"One Night Only" opens in theaters on Friday, August 7, 2026. just in time for the last gasp of summer counterprogramming.

When Anthony Bourdain was 19-year-old, he had no book deal, no show, no reputation, just a girl he followed to the end of Cape Cod and no idea what he would do there. Director Matt Johnson's "Tony" (USA 2026 | 106 min.) captures him entirely in that moment, decades before the writer, the TV host, or the death that tragically closed the book on him.

Nineteen-year-old Tony (Dominic Sessa) is someone hard to root for on the surface: a smooth talker, a frequent liar, a kid getting by on charm because he hasn't built anything real yet. He follows Nancy (Emilia Jones), a girl from his high school he has a crush on, to Provincetown, knowing nobody and with nowhere to go. He talks his way into washing dishes for Chef (Antonio Banderas), the restaurateur running a small seafood spot, and it's Tony's first job in any kitchen. Without a place to stay, he ends up camping out on Chef's patio for an extended stretch, not even inside the house. It's that one impulsive decision, none of it makes sense in hindsight, that quietly sets up the rest of his life. The film never over-explains this irony. It just lets you sit with how little Tony understands about what he's actually doing.

What does come through is the courage underneath the recklessness. Broke, unqualified, and with no real plan, Tony still throws himself at the opportunity in front of him instead of retreating to something safer. Whether or not you like him at the moment, that instinct to leap first and figure it out later reads as the seed of the person he'd become. The film trusts the audience to feel that connection rather than spelling it out.

Where the story gets shakier is Tony's relationship with Chef. Chef takes Tony under his wing almost immediately after they meet, even letting Tony sleep on his property, despite Tony having zero kitchen experience, and gives him little reason to be trusted. The film wants this mentorship to feel like it makes sense, but it never quite shows us what Chef sees in this kid before Tony has done anything to deserve it. It's a gap the film asks you to fill in yourself, and not every viewer will.

Sal (Leo Woodall) is the film's most alive presence, a coworker who embodies every temptation and bad habit that runs through restaurant kitchens. Woodall plays Sal with a loose, confident and dangerous charisma that makes every scene he's in mesmerizing. It feels like Sal could tip into chaos at any second in life while being the most trusted person in the kitchen, and it's easily the standout performance here.

However, the burning question is who this film is really for. Knowing where young Tony ends up is what makes you extend him grace even when he's lying to someone's face or making a mess of his own life. Strip that knowledge away and what's left is a coming-of-age story about an unremarkable, not especially likable kid stumbling through a summer. That's not necessarily a flaw, but it does mean the film is working with a built-in safety net that a viewer unfamiliar with Anthony Bourdain simply won't have.

It's hard to imagine that going to Provincetown pursuing a girl from school completely shaped Anthony Bourdain's life and career, and this film succeeds in telling that captivating story with a terrific ensemble cast.

"Tony" opens on Friday, August 7, 2026 in New York and Los Angeles, and in the San Francisco Bay Area theaters on Friday, August 21, 2026.