MOVIE REVIEW – If Marty Mauser has ever uttered a single honest sentence in his life, chances are it slipped out by mistake. Labeling Marty a pathological liar is perfectly correct, yet still doesn’t fully capture the scale of his delusion. The central figure of Marty Supreme turns deception into a personal artistic discipline. Officially he’s a table tennis player, but his real profession is hustling, and he genuinely believes that sufficient conviction can bend reality to match whatever story he’s selling.

Marty is a quintessential Josh Safdie creation. In the past, Safdie worked alongside his brother Benny, co-directing films like Good Time and Uncut Gems, stories about frantic strivers trapped in worlds that function like quicksand, where every move toward escape only drags them deeper into disaster. This year the Safdie brothers split off into separate directing efforts. Benny delivered the technically striking but dramatically restrained sports biopic The Smashing Machine, while Josh made Marty Supreme, a film that feels like pure Safdie DNA: emotionally bruising, breathlessly kinetic, and charged with raw, nerve-fraying New York energy.

A Shoe Store, A Paddle, And A Talent For Ruin

The story kicks off in a modest women’s shoe shop in the 1950s. Marty (Timothée Chalamet), a born schemer, is the store’s top salesman and speeding toward a management position that promises financial security, which he is strangely determined to destroy as fast and as spectacularly as possible. Outside of work, he’s among the world’s most gifted ping pong players, dreaming of transforming his side passion into a profitable career that could elevate both the sport of table tennis and his own bank account in one bold stroke.

If he could channel all his drive into that single ambition, success might actually be within reach. Instead, Marty ricochets from distraction to distraction like a ball in play. Early in Marty Supreme, he reignites a relationship with Rachel (Odessa A’zion), a lifelong friend who is also married, in the store’s basement stockroom, gets her pregnant, and immediately adds a ticking clock to his frantic chase for fame and fortune. When his boss – who doubles as his stepfather – refuses to give him the money he needs to travel to a table tennis championship in Japan, Marty robs the store, pockets the cash, and flies across the globe. (All of this unfolds to a soundtrack packed with gloriously out-of-era yet emotionally perfect ’80s pop tracks like Alphaville’s “Forever Young” and Tears For Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”)

Climbing Up While Kicking Away Every Step

In Japan, Marty edges toward real stardom, only to sabotage himself again and again. He wins over a wealthy businessman – portrayed with surprising finesse by Kevin O’Leary, widely known as Shark Tank’s “Mr. Wonderful” – then rejects a job offer because accepting it would dent his pride. At the same time, he secretly pursues the man’s elegant trophy wife, former actress Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), and by the time Marty returns to New York, his stepfather wants him in jail and Rachel’s husband wants him buried. That’s still before Marty agrees to look after the injured dog of a drifter – played with memorable presence by filmmaker Abel Ferrara – only to ditch his promise to take the animal to the vet so he can hustle table tennis games for easy money at a local bowling alley instead.

Problems stack on top of problems without pause. Every temporary fix triggers a fresh crisis that demands immediate attention, setting off yet another emergency, and the film sustains this pressure for a relentless 150 minutes. Anyone who found Uncut Gems a relaxing cinematic experience will find Marty Supreme a rude awakening. (If another standout 2025 release hadn’t claimed it first, One Battle After Another would have been a fitting alternate title.) Safdie constructs the narrative like a juggler designing a stunt: How many objects can stay in the air? What if one of them is a sword? What if that sword is on fire? What if I do all this while balancing on a wire? And why not add one more? For Safdie, the answer is always yes.

Pride, Punishment, And The Cost Of Wanting More

The same philosophy drives Marty, and the parallel is no accident. He seems almost medically incapable of settling for a modest win when the promise of a greater triumph glitters just ahead – even if chasing it risks everything he’s already gained. Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein display a sharp instinct for dramatic cruelty, repeatedly dangling Marty’s deepest desires within reach before yanking them away at the last possible second. His ordeals and temptations take on a near-Biblical scale, and the film gradually resembles a modern parable about divine payback for the sin of hubris. (It’s also worth noting that Marty’s Jewish identity is a meaningful part of who he is.)

Marty shares a clear spiritual lineage with Adam Sandler’s hapless operator in Uncut Gems, with one crucial difference: Marty is still in his twenties, an age that makes his overconfidence and poor decisions slightly easier to forgive. You want to despise him for his arrogance and his uncanny ability to wreck his own momentum, yet Timothée Chalamet plays him with such electric intensity and undeniable movie-star magnetism that rooting against him feels impossible, especially as the stakes rise and he stubbornly pushes forward in his quest to become the greatest table tennis player alive, despite overwhelming evidence that he should quit. He charms the audience just as effectively as he charms Rachel, Kay, and everyone else caught in his orbit.

Truth At Last, Or Just Another Performance

Safdie withholds any real release from Marty Supreme’s tightly wound tension until a surprising finale that loops the narrative back to its opening beats. Without revealing how events conclude, the ending leaves viewers with questions worth sitting with. In the final scene, Marty delivers several direct, seemingly sincere statements to another character, remarks that earlier would have felt completely alien to him. So what are we witnessing: genuine growth after a journey that circled the globe, an overdue confession of truth, or simply one more expertly delivered lie in a life built almost entirely on them?

-Gergely Herpai “BadSector”-