Marty Supreme

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There is a moment roughly forty minutes into Marty Supreme when Timothée Chalamet — playing a scrappy, silver-tongued table tennis hustler in postwar Manhattan — leans across a grimy game-room table and smirks with the kind of electric, unhinged confidence that makes you forget you are watching an actor perform. You are simply watching a man become legend, or at least believe very hard that he is about to. That feeling, that intoxicating mix of dread and exhilaration, does not leave for the film’s remaining two hours. Marty Supreme is one of the most singular, audacious, and genuinely thrilling films to arrive on screen in years — a sports movie that refuses every convention of the genre while somehow delivering everything you could ever want from one.

A Director Unchained
To understand what makes Marty Supreme so extraordinary, you first need to understand the man who made it. Josh Safdie grew up in New York City, raised on the gritty, overlooked corners of a city that most films pretend do not exist. He began making films as a teenager, and his early work — small, raw, shot on whatever camera he could afford — showed an obsessive attention to the specific texture of urban life: its smells, its rhythms, its desperate, beautiful, self-defeating inhabitants.

Working alongside his brother Benny Safdie, Josh built a reputation for crackling, nerve-shredding intensity. Their breakthrough came with Good Time (2017), a relentless one-night thriller starring Robert Pattinson that earned a Palme d’Or nomination at Cannes and rewired the idea of what a crime film could look and feel like. Two years later came Uncut Gems (2019), a film so anxiety-inducing it practically gave audiences palpitations — starring Adam Sandler in what many consider the performance of his lifetime, and executive produced by Martin Scorsese, who recognized in the Safdies a kinship to his own early work. Together, these films cemented the brothers as the most electrifying filmmakers working in American independent cinema.

Then, in early 2024, Josh and Benny quietly announced they would no longer be directing together. The split, described by Benny as a natural progression, left the film world wondering what each would do alone. With Marty Supreme, Josh’s first solo feature since his 2008 debut The Pleasure of Being Robbed, the answer is resoundingly clear: he has not lost a step. If anything, he has sharpened his vision into something even more focused and ferocious.

Ping-Pong, Ambition, and the American Dream
On paper, a 1950s period piece about a Jewish shoe salesman trying to become the world table tennis champion sounds like an oddball premise at best. In Safdie’s hands, it becomes a sweeping, faintly absurdist epic about ambition, identity, survival, and what it means to claw your way to significance in a world built to ignore you. Marty Mauser — the character Chalamet plays, loosely inspired by the real-life hustler and ping-pong champion Marty Reisman — is not a hero in any conventional sense. He is narcissistic, manipulative, foul-mouthed, and serially self-destructive. He lies to his friends, exploits those who love him, and burns every bridge he crosses.

And yet you cannot take your eyes off him. Safdie, working again with co-writer Ronald Bronstein, structures the film as a picaresque odyssey through a seedy, teeming postwar Manhattan — shadowy game rooms, backroom gambling dens, glamorous hotel suites, and the claustrophobic apartments of the Lower East Side. Shot by cinematographer Darius Khondji almost entirely on 35mm film, using vintage anamorphic lenses to recreate the grainy warmth of a 1950s New York that feels simultaneously archival and alive, the film is a visual triumph from first frame to last. The table tennis sequences are spectacular — balletic, percussive, filmed with a close-in intensity that makes a paddle and a small white ball feel like instruments of war.

What lifts Marty Supreme into genuine strangeness — and genuine greatness — is the film’s willingness to layer meaning onto its sports-movie scaffolding. Marty’s quest to defeat an elite Japanese champion is quietly, achingly reframed as a post-Holocaust parable: a Jewish man trying to prove survival, assimilation, and defiant regeneration on the world stage. A flashback involving Géza Röhrig — from the harrowing Son of Saul — as a concentration camp survivor and table tennis champion is among the most startling and moving sequences in recent memory, arriving like a thunderclap in the middle of what might otherwise seem like a frenetic comedy. It is the kind of tonal gamble only a director of supreme confidence would attempt, and Safdie lands it with extraordinary grace.

Chalamet: A Performance for the Ages
But the central miracle of Marty Supreme is Timothée Chalamet. Now thirty years old, Chalamet has spent the better part of a decade building one of the most remarkable young careers in Hollywood history — Call Me By Your Name, Beautiful Boy, Dune, Wonka, and last year’s Oscar-nominated turn as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. With each role, the question has been: is this actor as good as the hype, or is he simply a beautiful face with fortunate collaborators? Marty Supreme answers that question definitively and with something approaching ruthlessness.

Chalamet has never looked more physically transformed or more fully inhabited by a character. He began taking table tennis lessons in 2018 — the same year Safdie first approached him — and the years of preparation show in a body that moves through the film’s game sequences with the fluid, predatory confidence of someone who has lived inside this sport. But the physical dimension is almost a footnote. What Chalamet achieves emotionally is something rarer: he makes Marty Mauser deeply, genuinely unlikable, and then somehow, impossibly, makes you root for him anyway. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich described it as one of the most colossal movie performances of the 21st century. That is not hyperbole. There is a particular scene — Marty alone in a London hotel room, his borrowed money spent, his schemes collapsing — where Chalamet does almost nothing at all. No dialogue, no grand gesture. Just a face rearranging itself through humiliation, grief, and the terrifying recognition of one’s own flaws. It is the kind of acting that leaves a mark.

The supporting cast is equally inspired. Gwyneth Paltrow, in a luminous return to the screen, plays a faded Hollywood actress with an effortless mixture of glamour and melancholy. Odessa A’zion delivers a star-making performance as Marty’s long-suffering childhood friend. Kevin O’Leary — yes, the Shark Tank investor — is perfectly, amusingly cast as a smug industrialist. And the filmmaker Abel Ferrara shows up as a dog-loving mobster in one of the film’s many pieces of audacious meta-casting.

Awards and Recognition
The awards season has responded to Chalamet’s performance with something close to unanimous admiration. He took home the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy — becoming the youngest recipient of that prize — and the Critics’ Choice Award for Best Actor, also a record for his age. He has received his third Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, following his previous nomination for A Complete Unknown just one year prior, making him the youngest man to earn consecutive nominations since James Dean in 1957. As a producer of the film, he is also Oscar-nominated for Best Picture.

The film itself has been received with near-universal critical acclaim. On Rotten Tomatoes, it holds a 93% approval rating from 347 critics, while Metacritic awarded it a score of 89 out of 100, indicating universal acclaim. Commercially, the film has become A24’s highest-grossing release ever, surpassing even Uncut Gems, with worldwide earnings exceeding $173 million and still climbing. A24 sent a bright orange blimp over Los Angeles to announce its release — a marketing move that felt perfectly in sync with the film’s own gleeful, outsized confidence.

A Masterwork
Marty Supreme is not for everyone. Its two-and-a-half-hour runtime is relentless, its protagonist is often genuinely difficult to be around, and Safdie’s filmmaking — all handheld urgency, synth-pop score courtesy of Daniel Lopatin, and faces pressed against the lens — demands rather than invites your attention. But for those willing to submit to its particular, dizzying frequency, it is an experience that lingers long after the final frame.

This is cinema that believes in the strange, messy, contradictory power of a single human being willing everything they have into a single obsessive purpose. In Marty Mauser, Josh Safdie and Timothée Chalamet have created a character who is both deeply specific to his era and timelessly, almost mythically recognizable. And in Marty Supreme, they have made a film that could only have been made now, by exactly these collaborators, at this particular fever pitch of creative ambition — a film that plays, as the Rotten Tomatoes consensus notes, like a game of table tennis itself: explosive, unpredictable, and defined by movements executed with both passion and precision.
Do not miss it.

Linda Juarez is a film critic. She has collaborated in an array of magazines and blogs. Her forthcoming book Latine in Hollywood will be publish in 2027.

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Posted: March 10, 2026 at 10:21 pm