{"id":4038,"date":"2026-01-03T13:09:53","date_gmt":"2026-01-03T13:09:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=4038"},"modified":"2026-01-03T17:20:27","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T17:20:27","slug":"marty-supreme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2026\/01\/03\/marty-supreme\/","title":{"rendered":"Marty Supreme"},"content":{"rendered":"

Arriving festooned with nominations \u2013 and even some awards \u2013 making many critics\u2019 top ten lists and practically screaming Oscar buzz, comes Josh Safdie\u2019s Marty Supreme<\/strong><\/em>, loosely based on the real-life table tennis star Marty Reisman, and featuring a typically intense and brilliant performance from Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet in the lead. Chalamet is Marty Mauser, who excels at table tennis (and is a decent shoe salesman) but whose personal and financial life is a disaster.<\/p>\n

The film falls somewhat awkwardly into three segments, the first in which Marty competes at the British Open and loses in the final, the second in which he scrambles to raise the money he needs to get to Japan for the World Championships and the third in which he faces his nemesis again in Tokyo. It\u2019s rather as if someone has remade The Hustler<\/em> or The Color of Money<\/em> with table tennis instead of pool, but then someone else has spliced a remake of Uncut Gems<\/em> into the middle.<\/p>\n

As a portrait of a manic, entitled, impulsive, selfish sporting genius it\u2019s rather bracing, sometimes thrilling. But structurally it\u2019s awkward and the middle section not only feels disconnected from the sports movie opening and closing, but it\u2019s far too long and risks becoming repetitive. After the third or fourth time Marty lets perfectly good opportunities slip through his fingers, I was beginning to wonder why I was supposed to root for this guy at all, which meant I was far less invested in whether the idiot won his final match or not.<\/p>\n

The baggy middle and excessive running time wouldn\u2019t be so bad if Safdie used the extra time to meticulously tie up every loose end, but this is a film which frays as it extends, with the result that numerous seemingly-important plot lines end up going nowhere (the orange ping pong balls, the mystery of Endo\u2019s racket, Marty\u2019s relationship with Wally, the fact that Marty is supported by Rockwell and banging his wife).<\/p>\n

Set against this however, is Safdie\u2019s fluid and muscular camerawork, some brilliantly-staged table tennis action and a great many entertaining set pieces with Chalamet lighting up the screen at every turn. There\u2019s also a lovely feeling of time and place, and Safdie\u2019s typically eccentric casting adds to the enjoyment (entrepreneur Kevin O\u2019Leary as entrepreneur Milton Rockwell, director David Mamet as a theatre director, Penn Jillette as a gun-toting farmer, Sandra Bernhard and Fran Drescher as Marty\u2019s neighbour and mother).<\/p>\n

Not my film of the year, but I\u2019m very pleased to have seen it and I wouldn\u2019t be at all surprised to see Chalamet accepting the Best Actor Oscar and stunned if he wasn\u2019t at least nominated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Arriving festooned with nominations \u2013 and even some awards \u2013 making many critics\u2019 top ten lists and practically screaming Oscar buzz, comes Josh Safdie\u2019s Marty Supreme, loosely based on the real-life table tennis star Marty Reisman, and featuring a typically intense and brilliant performance from Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet in the lead. Chalamet is Marty Mauser, who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[12,13,541,19],"class_list":["post-4038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","tag-movies","tag-oscars","tag-oscars-2026","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-138","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4038"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4041,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4038\/revisions\/4041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}