The new film “Tony” opens with a young Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) sitting in an interview for a writing fellowship. The curly-haired Vassar student spins up a laughable book pitch only an English major could love — a dialogue between Jack Kerouac and George Orwell written on a single sheet of paper that Bourdain describes as a “Building Romans” [sic].

Malapropism aside, “Tony” is a great example of a bildungsroman — a story that chronicles a character’s moral and emotional growth, often on the verge of adulthood. In that first scene, director Matt Johnson (“BlackBerry”) captures many of the adjectives that could be used to describe the future celebrity chef, who passed away in 2018: brash, inquisitive, sensitive, pretentious, self-destructive. 

By the end of “Tony,” which takes place over a single summer Bourdain spent in Provincetown, a young Tony is still all of those things. But he finally has a sense of direction, one that would eventually lead him to the upper echelons of the culinary world.

After failing to land the fellowship despite telling his parents it was a near-lock, Tony heads to the Cape, chasing a high school crush, Nancy (Emilia Jones, “CODA”), who he has thus far mostly failed to impress. Upon discovering she already has a boyfriend, Tony does the only sensible thing and gets blackout drunk. After ending up in the gutter, he’s rescued by the unnamed Chef (Antonio Banderas), who not only lets him sleep on his hammock, but allows him to wash dishes in the kitchen of his tourist trap restaurant.

If Chef is the angel on Tony’s shoulder, giving him discipline and structure, then Sal, the restaurant’s oyster shucker, is the devil. Played with a louche Masshole charm by Leo Woodall (“The White Lotus”), Sal is 100 percent id. Riding out his shift one bump of coke at a time, Sal spends every non-working moment drinking, fighting, and screwing with abandon. (He even cuts a notch out of each girl’s door every time he gets lucky, keeping them in a jar in the kitchen.) It’s easy to see why an impressionable Tony is pleased to have Sal as a wingman, and his schtick always toes the line between cheeky and dangerous.

Sessa, who was plucked from obscurity at Deerfield Academy to play a complicated coming-of-ager in “The Holdovers,” is excellent as Bourdain. He tells everyone who will listen that he’s a writer, not realizing how transparent his leather jacket and mispronounced ten-dollar words really are. Sessa gives Bourdain an edge, furious at the world for his failure to manifest a lifestyle that he barely understands. But he also imbues him with a burgeoning curiosity, spending many hours off the clock picking up tips and tricks from Chef.

“Tony” is by no means a documentary, with Johnson and co-writers Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels, and Lou Howe’s script focusing on the emotional truth of a young Bourdain rather than drilling down on the particulars. Bourdain arrived in Provincetown in 1972, yet we see 1975’s “Jaws” on a movie marquee, and Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” (1976) soundtracks a particularly high-energy scene.

Along with a number of additional period-appropriate needle drops (The Modern Lovers, Brian Eno), the film’s score is a standout, with Johnson’s sketch comedy partner Jay McCarrol weaving in a melancholic piano that gives the film its spine. And for an indie film with a modest budget, “Tony” looks spectacular: The warm, nostalgic feel of 1970s Provincetown is beautifully captured by cinematographer Michael Bauman (“One Battle After Another”), who used older, wider lenses to achieve the film’s grainier texture. It feels like every scene was shot during the golden hour of a picture-perfect Cape summer day.

“Tony” loses steam a bit near the finish line when Bourdain veers away from Chef and back to Sal, who has moved on from coke to harder vices. Bourdain, who died by suicide at age 61, was candid about his heroin addiction during his life. But Johnson chooses to elide any drug use by its protagonist, letting Sal be the lone on-screen sinner. It’s a respectable choice, but the cuts feel obvious. And as Tony begins to draw Nancy closer, it highlights how under-used Jones has been in the role. In reality, Nancy played an outsized role in Bourdain’s life, but here she is more an object of desire than a fully realized character.

But those story choices do little to dim the overall mood of “Tony.” In telling the story of a complex man whose demons were evident, Johnson and co. have gone a slightly safer route without completely whitewashing Bourdain’s life story. By limiting the focus to a single summer in Provincetown, Bourdain – and the audience – are given a very welcome happy ending.

Rating: *** out of 4

“Tony” opens in limited theaters Aug. 14, before expanding on Aug. 21.

For almost 40 years, a stamp of approval from Oprah Winfrey has been the ultimate status symbol, and a near-guarantee of commercial success — just ask Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil.

Winfrey’s talk show launched in 1986 and became a sensation. The talk show raked in Daytime Emmy awards, and the host’s sway with the audience was undeniable. Winfrey’s influence was, and still is, so potent that marketing pros called the boost in sales following an endorsement “the Oprah Effect.” Books have shot to the top of bestseller lists, brands such as Spanx and Ugg have become household names and multiple television personalities have been launched, including two controversial health professionals whose endorsements from Winfrey haven’t exactly aged well for some fans.

During a recent interview with the Television Academy’s Emmy Magazine, Winfrey addressed her ties with the conservative TV personalities, saying “People criticize me for Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz, because of their politics or their views.”

In the ’90s, Phil McGraw was a licensed psychologist who co-founded a trial consulting firm and was hired to help Winfrey when she was sued in Texas for questioning the safety of beef on her show amid a mad cow disease epidemic happening in the U.K. According to disgruntled cattlemen, the “Oprah Effect” doesn’t just have the power to boost sales, it can drop them too.

Winfrey won the case in 1998, and was so impressed by McGraw that she invited him onto her show and he subsequently landed a weekly segment. A few years later, he launched his own talk show with Winfrey’s backing.

“Dr. Phil, he was so practical, so down to earth, so real. And he would ride in the car with me every morning on the way to trial, where I’m literally sitting on trial for six weeks. I felt that he was so instrumental in helping me. I thought, ‘Oh, you could help a lot of people. You should come on my show,’” she told the outlet.

Dr. Oz came into the fold, Winfrey said, by way of introduction from her best friend, fellow television personality and news anchor Gayle King.

“He explained practical things like colon cancer and bowel movements,” Winfrey told Emmy Magazine. “I thought he had the language for explaining medical things in a way that was helpful to me. I thought it would be helpful to many other people. And that is how they ended up on the show.”

Dr. Mehmet Oz made his debut on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2004, and in the next few years he made more than 60 appearances, offering health advice to viewers. In 2009, he followed in Dr. Phil’s footsteps and launched his own talk show, with Winfrey’s production company backing the venture.

In recent years, Dr. Phil has aligned himself with MAGA, and in October 2024 he spoke at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden presidential campaign rally. Last year, he embedded with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials during raids, including in Chicago, where he and his crew taped arrests.

In 2020, when Dr. Phil celebrated a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he thanked Winfrey in his speech, saying she has mentored him and moved him forward in life. “No doubt about it… You cannot understand the power of the O factor,” he said. “There would be no Dr. Phil without Oprah, so blame her if you’re going to blame somebody.”

Similarly, Dr. Oz aligned himself with the MAGA and Make America Healthy Again movements. He ran for senate in Pennsylvania in 2022 with an endorsement from Trump. After losing, he joined the Trump administration as the administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Since McGraw and Oz became vocal allies of the Trump administration, news stories involving them have spawned a thread of replies and reposts with comments pointing the finger at Winfrey for platforming the men many moons ago.

“Oprah spun off Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, and gave oxygen to Suzanne Somers’ and Jenny McCarthy’s toxic messages. Her impact on the public discourse around medical advice was pretty uniformly terrible. I am not a fan,” reads one post on X.

“If it weren’t for Oprah, this quack Dr. Phil would be a nobody. Oprah has a lot to answer for,” reads another.

And, “Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz are the two worst things Oprah ever foisted on the public.”

Winfrey may have platformed the men decades ago, but her stance is clear today: “Everybody has their own path in life, and it has not one thing to do with me, and I don’t have one thing to do with them. At the time, the reason and intention behind me giving them their breaks was I thought they had valuable information to share that had been meaningful to me.”

A wealthy Greek shipping magnate hosts a lavish celebration for his daughter on his private island while secretly plotting to control her future and his own legacy in The Birthday Party, opening in Prague cinemas this weekend after premiering at last year’s Locarno Film Festival. This striking psychological drama from writer-director Miguel Ángel Jiménez, adapted from Panos Karnezis‘ acclaimed novel, boasts an arresting central performance by Willem Dafoe and gorgeous Mediterranean scenery, but its intimacy is undercut by a central flaw: we don’t really care about any of these people.

The Birthday Party opens in flashback, as Marcos Timoleon (Dafoe) learns of the death of his 18-year-old son in a plane crash at sea. By 1975, Marcos has transformed his grief into an all-consuming obsession with his family, his fortune and, above all, his legacy. He brings together an assortment of wealthy friends, political associates and hangers-on for the 25th birthday of his daughter Sofia (Vic Carmen Sonne), whose relationship with young English writer Ian Forster (Joe Cole) threatens to disrupt the future Marcos has carefully envisioned for her.

There’s a deliciously sinister setup here, somewhere between an Agatha Christie mystery and a Greek tragedy, as Marcos quietly manipulates the people around him while everyone else tries to figure out exactly what he is up to. Dafoe is perfectly cast as the Onassis-like patriarch, a man whose enormous wealth has given him the power to make everyone around him feel like a subordinate simply by raising an eyebrow. The actor’s performance is commanding without being showy; even his softest lines carry the implicit threat of someone who has never had to hear the word “no.”

The problem is that the film’s psychological drama doesn’t give us enough reason to care about the characters. Karnezis’ novel tells the story of Timoleon’s entire life, closely mirroring the biography of Aristotle Onassis, and gives us the context necessary to understand how this man became the person we see at the party. Jiménez and co-writers Giorgos Karnavas and Nicos Panagiotopoulos strip away almost all of that history to concentrate on the titular celebration. It’s an understandable choice, but it leaves Marcos frustratingly opaque.

We learn about him almost entirely through conversations with the other characters, or through what those characters say about him. The central conflict of a wealthy patriarch confronting his own mortality and attempting to ensure that his legacy survives through his daughter and her future children is potentially fascinating, but the film gives us precious little access to the man experiencing it.

Instead, much of the immediate drama centers on Sofia, particularly her relationship with Forster, who has been working on a biography of her father. This makes her seem like the protagonist for long stretches, even though Marcos’ machinations are ultimately driving the story. Once his intentions become clear, much of the mystery disappears, leaving the film with relatively little narrative momentum.

Yet The Birthday Party remains compelling almost entirely because of its cast. Dafoe is terrific, effortlessly establishing Marcos’ authority over everyone around him. Watching him negotiate with the colorful collection of people he has assembled on his island is often more interesting than the plot itself: He can dismiss someone with a glance, or completely change the temperature of a conversation with a seemingly innocuous remark.

Emma Suárez is also excellent as Marcos’ soon-to-be-ex-wife Olivia, who maintains an unexpectedly close relationship with him despite their impending separation. Christos Stergioglou (Dogtooth) brings weight to Marcos’ longtime friend and doctor Patrikios, while Sonne and Cole give the younger generation a necessary sense of volatility. The ensemble is first-rate, even when the script doesn’t seem to give them much to do.

What the screenplay lacks in narrative weight, however, Jiménez makes up for with an extraordinarily polished visual presentation. Cinematographer Gris Jordana makes the most of the film’s locations in Corfu, standing in for Marcos’ private island, with additional studio work in Athens. The widescreen compositions are immaculate, moving from sun-drenched Mediterranean exteriors to sultry nighttime parties and elegant interiors.

There’s also a wonderful tactile quality to the production design and the use of color. Jiménez understands that this world of extreme wealth should look almost unreal, and the film’s images frequently resemble photographs from a particularly decadent dream. Even during the later stretches, when all of Marcos’ cards are on the table and the mystery has largely evaporated, the visual design remains enough to keep us watching.

The same is true of the music. The score by Alexandros Livitsanos and Prins Obi blends Greek-influenced sounds with propulsive 1970s party rhythms. It gives the movie a unique identity and provides a momentum that the screenplay sometimes lacks.

There’s a wonderful sense of ancient tragedy lurking underneath all of this modern wealth and decadence. Marcos has spent his life acquiring everything he could possibly want, only to discover that money cannot protect him from mortality. His attempts to control his daughter’s future are ultimately an extension of that same impulse: If he can control what happens after his death, perhaps he can somehow defeat death itself.

But the film never quite transforms that idea into the emotional punch it seems to be reaching for. The Birthday Party is much more successful as a portrait of a fascinatingly powerful man than as a drama about the people surrounding him. When the film asks us to care about the consequences of Marcos’ decisions, we are too often left at an emotional distance.

Still, there’s enough here to recommend, particularly for arthouse audiences. Jiménez has created a strikingly composed psychological drama with a superb central performance, beautiful photography and an excellent score, and the final rendition of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood by Dafoe, backed by the Czech Studio Orchestra, recording from Prague, is an appropriately flamboyant cherry on top. The Birthday Party may not give us enough of Marcos Timoleon’s life to fully understand him, but watching Dafoe rule this little kingdom is a party worth attending.