4. Marty Supreme, dir. Josh Safdie
You watch Marty Supreme and you wonder how this little wormy fucker is getting away with it. The Safdies (or well, Safdie singular now, I guess) have/has made an entire career out of guys whose lives are frenetic unstable horrors. This is a specific type of New York guy, you can consider them the Safie (singular) Hero. They cause all kinds of damage all around them, and all of it was for nothing to begin with. Connie will never get back to robbing banks with his brother in Good Time, in Uncut Gems the rock Howard thinks will solve all his problems is not worth half of his claims. These guys burn through every credit line, be it financial or social, which would be deeply humiliating if they were capable of shame. As they sink deeper and deeper, they wander off into tangential sidequests that get them only further form the goal, spreading yet more chaos.
The thing with Marty Supreme is that uniquely amongst these Safdie (singular) Heroes, Marty (Timothée Chalamet) has a there there. This was not entirely quixotic. Marty Mauser is a great athlete, he actually can do everything he promises - or at least 99.99% of it. Maybe table tennis isn't the most glamorous of sports compared to say, football, but it still can be incredible on the screen. The Safdie (singular) is showing that Marty is capable of superhero things with a paddle and a ball. Mr. Supreme doesn't win the championship in England, since otherwise there would be no movie. However, winning second place is pretty damn impressive. In any other circumstance other than Marty's, it would be very profitable. Being just as good as your arrogance has a draw back though, because our boy cannot imagine failure to the point he isn't ready for a real challenge. Another athlete, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) gets to live the dream, and he wasn't half as obnoxious on the way to getting there.
Marty's most tragic flaw is that he's a great on the mic, and great on the table, but he's a terrible conman. That's a bad trio of traits to have. There is not a single lie he tells, a single shortcut he takes, a single scheme he runs that does not result in further problems for him. All the Safdie (singular) Heroes are digging their own graves, all of it is avoidable. They could turn back and be forgiven at any time. At worst, Marty can live a solid working class life in 1950s New York with a close family, friend circle, and a job at his uncle's shoe store he hates, though won't ever get fired from. With some patience he could be back winning tournaments. Instead Marty robs his uncle for plane money, dumps a huge hotel bill with his ping pong event organizers, gets his female best friend, Rachel (Odessa A'zion) pregnant, and then doesn't take responsibility for any of this. When all these bills come due at the same time, Marty goes on a crime epic of increasingly stupid stunts, trying to do more bad cons to make up the ground his failures cost him. It is all one step forward, three steps back.
Like, crime is bad, sure. However, sometimes it does pay and pay very well. Not for Marty, he sucks at it.
Marty is going to cause a great deal of ruckus in his weeks' long adventure to try to get out of Manhattan and onto a flight to Tokyo to try to compete in his second table tennis tournament. He's sort of an inverse Inside Llewyn Davis, where both period piece heroes are stuck in their own traps, unable to escape from their cycles of recurring errors. Davis thanks to severe depression and Marty thanks to alarming levels of self-esteem. One is chasing after a cat, the other is chasing after a dog. Only Marty Supreme is way more chaotic. Even taking a shower causes the bathtub to crash through the floor onto an old man (Abel Ferrara)'s arm.
I guess I get it. Marty does have his boyish charms, he is played by Timothée Chalamet, only slightly uglied by some pockmark make-up and a mustache I'm not sure about. He can charm his way into Rachel's heart or the bed older movie stars (Gwyneth Paltrow). You can even see why cuckholded rich husbands (a stunt-casted Kevin O'Leary) cannot throw Marty out with the trash. There's braggadocio mixed with a paradoxical ptiy. He calls his talent a "burden" at one point, as if he were the Kwisatz Haderach of ping pong. I don't think anybody is fooled by Marty, he only gets by because they see right through him. If he were a better conman, he'd be truly all alone.
Marty Supreme feels huge despite being about one scumbag. It's a shame is that the Safdie (singular) only shoots two or three big table tennis sequences. You want more. There's much more movement, space, and action than you'd think possible with just a little table and a net. Marty is running around stages and venues, making incredible shots. If you just measure your movie by how much is in it, how much really awesome stuff you get for the price of admission, Marty Supreme is one of the best of 2025. From a recreation of Lower East Side Jewish New York to dancing in the road next to a moving car to goofs with the Harlem Globetrotters to a shoot out with Penn Jillette, the Safdie (singular) has delivered a feast here. There's even a vampire in this movie!
A critical conversation in Marty Supreme happens with Marty's fellow Jewish ping-ponger, Bela Kletzki (Géza Röhrig). Marty has Bela recount a story from the Holocaust to impress a person at lunch. In the story, Bela finds a honeycomb out in the woods, smokes out the bees, smears honey all over his body, and lets the prisoners in his cabin lick his entire body. You can see the awful grin on Marty's face here. He hears this story and loves it, for the wrong reasons: the shock value, the perversion, the weirdness. What Bela did was much more than that. He was using his body in this motherly act of caring for other people in impossible circumstances, granting them sustenance and sweetness for could very well be the final time.
We end Marty Supreme with none of our boy's lofty ambitions achieved. Whether he deserves it or not, he is given another chance. And in the final scene of this movie, Marty might unlock the parts of him that are missing. He might finally understand why you would let dying people lick the honey off your chest.
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