Timothee Chalamet as Marty Supreme
Josh Safdie's Film Enthralls and Sucks
By: Susan Hall - Dec 19, 2025
Marty Supreme starring Timothée Chalamet, goes into wide release on Christmas Day. It is essentially the Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems redux. Shot by the fabulous Darius Khondji in zoomed-in close-up, with the camera moving alongside the figures and placing us right next to characters we may not want to know so well, the film grips us for two and a half hours.
But we come away empty.
Whereas Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems weaves in and out of warmth and caring—alongside the pressures of trying to sell an embedded opal to the real-life basketball star Kevin Garnett—Chalamet’s role, based on the table tennis great Marty Reisman, stays almost entirely in ugly mode. With the exception of a brief final moment, there is little modulation.
The creators talk about driving ambition. Is ambition always ugly? Probably yes. Yet it is most often mixed with kindness and generosity of spirit. It is not usually played on one note.
Who doesn’t love the texture of the Safdie Brothers’ work, developed out of the style of the Coen Brothers? It suited Uncut Gems perfectly. Yet if Marty Supreme was supposed to be a ping-pong film, the filmmakers fail to take advantage of the underlying story of Marty Reisman.
Reisman’s hustle involved actual games: you start for low stakes and lose. As the stakes rise, you continue to lose—until there’s enough money on the table to win and walk away. I recently watched this exact hustle with cards on the Chicago CTA. No one on the train objected. I was too scared to tell the dupes to stop.
This hustle may not have been available to the film’s director because Chalamet, for all his public talk about being a top-level tennis player, does not play top-level table tennis. Any shot in the film that looks elite is performed by a body double.
Film, of course, is about illusion. But to claim you worked as hard as Natalie Portman did in Black Swan, or as Solveig Dommartin did in Wings of Desire—where she performs all the trapeze work herself—is a kind of hustle too. Of course an angel falls in love with Solveig.
The angel in Marty Supreme is Odessa A’zion, Marty’s pregnant girlfriend. Gwyneth Paltrow, as an aging movie star, has moments as well. Overall, however, the film is not only dark but repulsive. Perhaps this was the creators’ intention.
Is this why they did not stick more closely to Reisman’s actual life? He performed in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin when Jesse Owens was also there. Owens was reprising his debut of Adidas sneakers worn to win at the 1936 Olympics.
At Marty Reisman’s ping-pong emporium on 96th Street and Broadway, you could run into Kurt Vonnegut, a table tennis enthusiast with endless questions about the game. Chess champion Bobby Fischer also played there. In Marty Supreme, you would never know that chess strategy is deeply related to table tennis strategy—especially speed chess.
But this is not really a table tennis film. It is about an empty man who may experience a very brief moment of redemption at the end.
The texture of a Safdie film—camera work, cutting, music—makes actors look very good. The language, too, is marvelously textured. Wondering why Adam Sandler did not receive acting nominations for Uncut Gems in 2019–2020, I realized that the directors’ techniques would be rewarded, not a performance. The same can be said of Chalamet’s performance here.
I was hoping to see the brilliant Safdie texture applied to a different kind of story. Instead, the film keeps falling back into blood, gore, and gunfights.
Will you be engaged if you watch the film? For sure.
Will you feel hustled when you leave? I did.