Filmmaking brothers Josh and Benny Safdie are on their nerve-fried version of an exercise kick. While their buzziest earlier movies as a duo followed characters on the margins of society—the addicts of Heaven Knows What; the hapless far-from-professional criminal of Good Time—their success with the Adam Sandler-led gambling thriller Uncut Gems and its proximity to professional sports seems to have unlocked the pair’s fascination with the thin and often arbitrary line between winning and losing. Their specific fixation on the desperation that can be unleashed by athletic contests (and the delusional idea that an athlete can bend the outcome by sheer force of will) is all over their lopsided pair of 2025 movies, the first features they’ve made fully apart. Earlier this fall, Benny chronicled the ups and downs of Ultimate Fighting pioneer Mark Kerr in The Smashing Machine; now Josh takes a more fanciful, fictionalized look at table tennis player Marty Reisman, rechristened Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), re-rechristened Marty Supreme. (Actually, “Marty Supreme” is the name of a branded table-tennis ball that Marty cajoles a friend’s father into financing early in the picture. But close enough.) The shared sensibilities of the two movies’ respective athletes practically beg for a winner to be declared between the brothers’ solo outings.
Marty Mauser seems particularly likely to throw his ping-pong paddle across the room in a rage if he was told that art is not a competition—or even that sports are about pushing yourself to do your best, not pushing others to coronate you as the best. Good as he is at table tennis, Marty might actually be better as a salesman; early in the film, we see him charming customers at a shoe store in 1950s Manhattan, even as he treats the task as secondary to cajoling his boss (and uncle) into supplying some promised money for an airplane ticket overseas, so he can participate in a table tennis championship. (Marty Supreme features a lot of cajoling.) When the boss doesn’t comply, Marty takes the money anyway and skips town.
That’s more or less how Marty’s story proceeds: at a relentless pace and with reckless disregard. Marty makes it to the tournament, which he’s convinced will catapult him to international stardom and success. When that doesn’t precisely happen—when his success is merely measurable and modest, not world-beating—he tries to hustle his way back into another shot at the big time. This involves juggling two relationships: a tenuous one with sad-eyed former movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) whose wealthy businessman husband (Kevin O’Leary) might be able to bankroll another overseas jaunt; and a longer-standing affair with Marty’s childhood sweetheart of sorts Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion).
All of this bad-decision bravado recalls Uncut Gems and the youthful con artistry of Catch Me If You Can. But Marty’s station in life is closer to the hero of Good Time than the upper-class Sandler character in Gems, and another Saturday Night Live alumnus entirely also comes to mind. As a shameless braggart in pursuit of greatness at a sport that might initially register somewhere between niche and ridiculous, Marty is basically a younger, more wiry version of a protagonist from a mid-’00s Will Ferrell sports comedy.
Of course, few of those Ferrell sports comedies feature rich, dark-toned 35mm cinematography from Darius Khondji or detailed production design from veteran Jack Fisk, which make Marty Supreme look like a lushly appointed period crime film, even if the criminality on display here is of the pettier variety. On the other hand, those crimes do add up; eventually, Marty has lengthened his unofficial rap sheet to include trespassing, destruction of property, fraud, and a half-hearted armed robbery. (There are also more quotidian bills and fines that wind up serving as heavier roadblocks than the more overtly dangerous stuff.) The miracle of Chalamet’s performance is that as brazen, indecent, and dishonest as Marty is, he makes a temporarily convincing case for himself as a thwarted athlete, rather than a crook with an athletic fixation. Chalamet transfers the fierce, quicksilver physicality of his game-time performances into his off-table antics. He seems perpetually ready to knock that little ball back to his opponent, whatever the situation.
This makes Marty Supreme great entertainment, and the most convincing case yet that Chalamet is a real-deal star, capable of carrying a movie without the cultural context and memorable supporting turns of something like A Complete Unknown. Yet as the movie sprints through its After Hours-ish gauntlets, it sometimes feels like Safdie is more focused on clearing jaw-dropping hurdles than connecting these obstacle courses into a bigger picture. The film makes some bold stylistic choices that leap forward from the 1950s milieu, most noticeably in the soundtrack, which uses a synth-heavy score and several ’80s pop hits for intentional and giddy hits of anachronism, and perhaps the curdled legacy of heedless every-man-for-himself bootstrapping. But there’s also a subtler sense that Safdie and longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein simply didn’t bother writing dialogue in a vernacular anywhere near the time period—that despite access to a bigger canvas, the movie is prioritizing immediacy above all else, including their other characters. Paltrow and A’zion both have great moments, but Kay and Rachel are pretty thin for the primary supporting players in a 150-minute movie. Here’s where the flip Will Ferrell comparison actually favors the larger, sillier man: All in, Talladega Nights has more to say about America’s champion culture, and its rapaciousness desire to win, than Marty Supreme. Maybe it’s appropriate, though, for Josh Safdie to handily “win” whatever unspoken competition there is between him and his brother, then chase that victory with a feeling that maybe something ineffable has been lost anyway.
Director: Josh Safdie
Writers: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie
Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Odessa A’zion, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kevin O’Leary, Tyler Okonma
Release Date: December 25, 2025
