Weekend Film Reviews

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.

Gregg Araki is one of the most important directors in the New Queer Cinema, the 1990s film movement that put daring and dark LGBTQ stories onscreen and produced household names like Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes. Araki’s movies The Living End and Doom Generation followed cynical queer teenagers as they wrestled with sex and death in an America that didn’t want or understand them. I Want Your Sex is about a new doom generation – Z, not X. Olivia Wilde plays a boundary-pushing artist who starts a kinky affair with her new employee, a recent college graduate played by Cooper Hoffman. “It’s a really funny movie,” says Alison Willmore, film critic for New York magazine. “Olivia Wilde leans into the most fun, diva aspects of her character.” Shawn Edwards, film critic for Fox 4 News in Kansas City, felt I Want Your Sex wanted to be “too many things” at once to work. “At only 90 minutes, it just felt way too long,” Edwards says. “The juvenile tone just hampered everything.”

Luis Valdez is widely known as the Godfather of Chicano theater. He directed the 1987 movie 'La Bamba' and the 1981 film 'Zoot Suit.' But Valdez also founded El Teatro Campesino, the in-house theater troupe for the United Farm Workers. His life is now the subject of a new documentary, ‘American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez.’ Film critics Dave White and Alonso Duralde call the film a “well-deserved victory lap.” The pair also review 'Her Private Hell,' 'Motor City,' and 'Sheep in the Box.'

'The Odyssey' discourse has been hard to escape ever since the cast was first announced early 2025. The film finally hits theaters this weekend, but does it live up to Homer’s epic poem? “If you're going to make a film about that work … it has to have such scale and it absolutely does,” says film critic Tim Grierson. Co-critic Angelica Jade Bastién adds “it's a very fascinating film that sometimes touches greatness, but it doesn't quite get there.” The pair also review 'Reading Lolita in Tehran,' 'Horsegirls' and 'Remake.'

'Moana' is the latest Disney movie to get the live-action treatment. Unfortunately, everything about the remake “feels artificial” for our film critics Witney Seibold and Katie Walsh. The pair also share their reviews of 'Night Nurse,' 'Evil Dead Burn,' and 'Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass.'