Marty Supreme (2025)
There is a particular kind of filmmaker who treats cinema less like storytelling and more like controlled detonation, and Josh Safdie is firmly in that camp. After cutting his teeth on scrappier, street-level fare alongside his brother Benny, including the brothers' breakthrough with Uncut Gems (2019), Josh steps out solo here for his first feature as a sole directing credit. Marty Supreme, produced by A24 and Central Pictures and landing in 2025, follows Marty Mauser, a young man whose singular ambition to be the greatest table tennis player alive puts him on a collision course with just about everyone in his life. It sounds, on paper, like an odd premise. In Safdie's hands, you suspect fairly quickly that the sport is almost beside the point. What the film is really interested in is the particular texture of obsession, the kind that curdles into something ugly and uncompromising, and what it costs the people who carry it and the people who love them.
The film arrives on the back of considerable critical noise, which is exactly the sort of pressure that can either confirm a director's vision or expose its seams. Safdie, to his credit, does not appear to have softened anything. The production carries the nervous, kinetic energy that has become something of a house style, but stretched here to a two-and-a-half-hour canvas and set against a mid-twentieth century backdrop that gives the whole thing an unusual period friction. The score and soundtrack come from Daniel Lopatin (known professionally as Oneohtrix Point Never), a collaborator who has previous form in this world, and his contribution here has drawn particular attention from those who have seen the film. For context on the kind of awards-season, prestige-adjacent atmosphere surrounding the picture, it is worth noting that Timothée Chalamet arrives fresh from his widely praised turn in A Complete Unknown (2024), a film that similarly asked him to inhabit a driven, prickly, and not entirely sympathetic figure on the edges of a particular American subculture.
The cast assembled around Chalamet is an eclectic and genuinely interesting one. Gwyneth Paltrow, whose film appearances have grown increasingly selective over the years, turns up in a role that will raise a few eyebrows in the best possible way. Odessa A'zion, who has been quietly building a reputation for punching well above the material she is given, appears in a supporting capacity. Then there is Tyler, The Creator, whose instinct for performance has surfaced in curious places before, and Kevin O'Leary, the businessman perhaps better known from television, whose casting feels either like a provocation or a masterstroke depending on your tolerance for that sort of thing. Chalamet himself has been building toward exactly this kind of role across his career, from the raw vulnerability he showed in Call Me by Your Name (2017) to the brittle, fraying intensity of Beautiful Boy (2018). The question the film poses, and which critics have been asking since the first screenings, is whether he has found the role that ties all of that together into something definitive.
For years, I’ve been saying that Oscar Isaac is this generation’s Al Pacino. But after sitting through Josh Safdie’s 2025 feature Marty Supreme, I’m ready to eat my words and hand that mantle straight to Timothée Chalamet. This is the Scarface of the Table Tennis world.
I went into this picture totally blind, though the deafening critical acclaim had me bracing for something special. What I got was a brilliant, white-knuckle ride that takes the raw, obsessive energy Chalamet showed in Beautiful Boy and Call Me by Your Name and cranks it up to an absolutely terrifying next level.
At its core, the film is a brutal character study on the single-mindedness of youth, wrapping brashness, pride, stupidity, and sheer selfishness into one firmly unlikeable protagonist. Marty is an absolute nightmare to be around, yet you can’t look away. Safdie, clearly drawing from the same well of panic that made Uncut Gems such a visceral experience, crafts a claustrophobic atmosphere where every single story beat feels like a relentless, anxiety-inducing gut punch. It’s a hefty two-and-a-half-hour runtime, but honestly, it never quite feels that long because the tension is wound so impossibly tight.
The ensemble cast does a cracking job orbiting Chalamet’s black hole of a performance, though I do have one major gripe. Odessa A'zion gives a brilliant performance that frankly deserved a much larger role in the narrative.
Where the film truly ascends into the stratosphere is the audio. Daniel Lopatin needs to take a massive bow. The soundtrack is an absolute triumph, featuring an oddly placed but utterly outstanding selection of synth-heavy 80s tracks for a film set in the late 40s and early 50s. The way the music, alongside the pulsing score during the action-heavy sequences, perfectly marries the visual chaos is what pushes this picture from a standard four-star effort into something truly special.
It’s not a flawless picture, but it is so agonisingly close that it barely matters. Safdie and Chalamet have crafted a deeply immersive, brilliantly scored, and unapologetically stressful piece of cinema that completely justifies the hype. It’s a fantastic, deeply rewarding watch that leaves you completely exhausted but thoroughly entertained.
Marty Supreme is, by any reasonable measure, one of the more arresting films A24 has put its name to in recent years, which is no small claim given the company's catalogue. It sits squarely in the tradition of American films about men who want too much and ruin themselves wanting it, a tradition that stretches back further than cinema itself, but Safdie and Chalamet give it a texture and a sound that feels genuinely their own. The table tennis setting, far from being a gimmick, turns out to be a rather efficient container for anxiety: small, fast, and mercilessly unforgiving of anything less than total focus. At two and a half hours, it demands something from its audience, and it is not especially interested in making that easy. But then the best films rarely are. Dream big, says the tagline, and Marty does. The trouble with dreaming big, of course, is what happens when you wake up.
Rating: ★★★★½ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2026-07-19
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Marty Supreme (2025) on YouTube
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