Film Review - Marty Supreme (2025)

Marty Supreme is the new movie by Josh Safdie and stars Timothee Chalamet as Marty Mauser, a high wire hustler and table tennis player in 1952 New York who wants to be the very best like no one ever was but his ego and drive to succeed more often than not gets in his way not too mention his abrasive personality.

Timothee Chalamet has been on a role for me lately with the Dune films, Wonka and A Complete Unknown a strong run of films of high quality and Chalamet himself proving himself as one his generations best actors could this movie build on that or would it be defeat.

Sadly this is somewhere in the middle for while there are good elements to this movie I was ultimately let down by the movie, firstly Chalamet is very good here anchoring the film very well with a high wire and high energy performance that if it was anyone else probably wouldn’t work as well and Safdie’s direction with its energetic and fast pacing suits him well, Odessa A’zion is also good here as Marty’s love interest Rachel and so is Fran Drescher and Abel Ferrara (director of King of New York and Bad Lieutenant) in their small roles.

And the table tennis scenes are excellent, shot and edited with high energy that really got me hooked into them when they were playing out on screen plus the music score by Daniel Lopatin is very good as well.

But there are some big issues I also had with this movie:

- First of those is Marty as a character is very very annoying at times with the ways he gets in everyones faces, makes promises he surely cannot keep and in the sport of table tennis finds it hard to accept loss and learn the lesson that there is always someone stronger out there in that same sport and having a worthy rival around is good to keep you on your toes and on top of your game but it seems that this lesson goes ignored throughout the film and it’s a real shame

- Secondly a number of the films character scenes resort to people simply yelling at each other in high voices and it bothered me so much that I wanted to yell out “SILENCE!!” like in the Dune films I hated it that much

- Third is Gwyneth Paltrow’s performance, she has been good in roles in the past but here it just felt like she was resorting to sad face a lot of the time she was on screen and I couldn’t help but wonder what Cate Blanchett might have done with this role as I feel she would’ve sold the underlining tragedy of that character in a more resonant way.

- And lastly some of the song choices felt very out of place in the films 1952 setting and again I started to wonder if the story might have worked better if the setting was the 1980s or a post GFC world so the song choices on the soundtrack wouldn’t feel so jarring, some of them worked but others did not.

And so that was Marty Supreme and like One Battle After Another this is another Best Picture nominee that has good moments but didn’t work as well for me as I had hoped, 2 and a half out of 5.