Marty Supreme (2025)

3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

King Pong

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Brother team Benny and Josh Safdie split up this year to make their own movies, Benny with The Smashing Machine, and Josh with Marty Supreme. The latter is a high-tension, high-stakes whirlwind not unlike their previous film Uncut Gems, but perhaps not as relentless; this one is funnier, and with pacing that allows for moments to breathe. (Even though it's monumentally long, it's also crisply edited.)

Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a fast-talking, hyper-confident New Yorker with thick glasses, a cheesy mustache, and a unibrow. By day he works at a shoe store to save money for his career as a table tennis champion. He goes to London for the tournament, brags to reporters, and seduces ex-movie starlet Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrwo), but loses at the eleventh hour to an eerily skilled Japanese player, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi).

Humiliated, he joins forces with ex-champion Bela Kletzki (Géza Röhrig) as halftime clowns for the Harlem Globetrotters. When he returns home from an eight-month tour, he finds that his girlfriend Rachel is pregnant (Odessa A'zion) and that his uncle has had him arrested for stealing from the shoe store (which he did).

With time running out for his chance at a rematch, he desperately tries to raise the money he needs by trying any dirty scheme he can think of, from stealing a necklace from Kay to performing a complex hustle with his cab-driving pal Tyler (Tyler, the Creator). Director Abel Ferrara co-stars as a gangster, Fran Drescher (whom I did not recognize) plays Marty's mother, and apparently even Penn Jillette (whom I did not even spot) shows up, as well as many other semi-famous New Yorkers.