Bravado, insecurity, deceit. These are the bitter ingredients that seasoned the chef Anthony Bourdain inside the pressure cooker of the restaurant industry. Set over one formative summer in 1975, Matt Johnson’s affectionately sleazy biopic “Tony” is a portrait of the culinary adventurer (who died by suicide in 2018 at the age of 61) as a snotty 19-year-old Vassar student who doesn’t know an oyster knife from his ego. “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” Bourdain confessed in his 2000 bestseller “Kitchen Confidential,” a scorching memoir that elevated him from obscurity to damaged saint. “Tony” opens with that quote and proves it with scenes of boozing, puking and petty crime. Miraculously, it’s the most heartwarming comedy of the year.-LA Times

“Even if Tony were not a biopic at all, but simply the fictional story of one screwed-up kid’s transformative summer working in a restaurant kitchen, it would be a movie worth watching.”-Slate