‘Marty Supreme’ is Firing on All Cylinders

December 18, 2025

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He’s Supreme-ing all over the place! (CREDIT: A24)

Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa, A’zion, Kevin O’Leary, Tyler Okonma, Abel Ferrara, Fran Drescher, Koto Kawaguchi, Sandra Bernhard, Spenser Granese, Luke Manley, John Catsimatidis, Isaac Mizrahi, George Gervin, Ted Williams, Emory Cohen, Géza Röhrig, Larry “Ratso” Sloman, Ralph Colucci, Penn Jillette

Director: Josh Safdie

Running Time: 150 Minutes

Rating: R for Plenty of Language, Inescapable Violence, and Some Embarrassing Nudity

Release Date: December 19, 2025 (Limited Theaters)/December 25, 2025 (Expands Nationwide)

What’s It About?: Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) could just be the biggest deal in the world of 1950s global athletics. That’s how transcendent his table tennis skills are. Now you may be thinking, “Table tennis? Measly old ping pong? What are you getting on about?” Well, Marty doesn’t have any patience for your skepticism. In fact, he doesn’t have patience for much of anything. On the rare occasions when he loses, he throws a fit about how his opponents aren’t playing the game properly. And when he’s back home in New York City in between tournaments, he’s getting up to all sorts of trouble, much of it of his own making. He’s being pulled in a million different directions, by a colorful cast of characters who are equally charmed and enervated by him. They include his very pregnant childhood friend (Odessa A’zion) who’s married to someone else but claims that the baby is his; a faded movie star (Gwyneth Paltrow) he’s trying to mack on; her control freak husband (Kevin O’Leary, aka Shark Tank‘s “Mr. Wonderful”) who could also be his sponsor; his uncle (Larry “Ratso” Sloman) who tries to get him arrested to teach him a lesson; some random criminal (Abel Ferrara) who puts Marty in charge of his beloved dog; and his taxi driver friend (Tyler Okonma, aka Tyler, the Creator) who gets strung along for the ride. Meanwhile, his mother (Fran Drescher) is caught in the background looking incredulous.

What Made an Impression?: I Probably Would’ve Fallen Asleep: There are some movies that I’m afraid to talk about too in depth when reviewing them because I don’t want to spoil anything. Marty Supreme is similar but profoundly different: I don’t want to say too much because I could easily end up just listing all the plot details without providing any analysis. This is a dense flick that also manages to whiz by despite its two-and-a-half-hour running time. Ostensibly a sports drama, it’s also just as much a crime caper, screwball comedy, and lovingly realized period piece. And each slice of the pie delivers.
That Boy Can Ball: But let’s be clear, even though the plot isn’t all ping pong all the time, Chalamet came to play. There are no half-measures with this thespian. He’s expressed his desire to be one of the all-time greats, and he’s clearly compelled to impress his audience. But this isn’t joyless Method acting, instead it only makes us hungry for more. Just as he served as a musical guest on SNL after playing Bob Dylan, I wouldn’t put it past him to show up paddle in hand for the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Games.
A Champion for the Ages: To sum it all up, Marty Supreme is one of the most unmissable cinematic experiences of the year, a runaway train that careens off the tracks all the way to Jupiter. And a bang-up entertainer like this delivers an appropriately propulsive soundtrack, with Oneohtrix Point Never delivering one of his typical mind-melting scores, while some needle drops from the ’80s offer temporal displacement that somehow doesn’t feel anachronistic. Give yourself time and space to breathe after this one, you’re gonna need it.

Marty Supreme is Recommended If You: Wish that Uncut Gems had been more like Forrest Gump (or vice versa)

Grade: 4.5 out of 5 Orange Ping Pong Balls

Adam Sandler is Unbound in the Almost Unbearably Intense ‘Uncut Gems’

December 12, 2019

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CREDIT: A24

Starring: Adam Sandler, Kevin Garnett, Julia Fox, Lakeith Stanfield, Idina Menzel, Eric Bogosian, Abel Tesfaye, Judd Hirsch, Mike Francesa

Director: Ben and Josh Safdie

Running Time: 134 Minutes

Rating: R for Shouted Overlapping Profanity, the Violence of High-Stakes Gambling, and a Few Sexy Times

Release Date: December 13, 2019 (Limited)

I know some people who don’t love sports but are able to appreciate athletics when it’s in a movie because you really get to see the emotions and stories behind the games. That has perhaps never been more viscerally true than it is in the climax of Uncut Gems, which hinges on a specific stat line in the deciding game in the 2012 NBA Eastern Conference semifinals between the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers. There are millions of dollars at stake in high-profile events like these, and writing-directing brother Josh and Benny Safdie were astute enough to realize that they could craft a particularly gripping narrative out of one story behind those millions. To wit: New York City diamond district jeweler Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) has placed a bet on the performance of Boston’s star baller Kevin Garnett, and it is no exaggeration to say that it is probably the most significant bet he has ever placed in his life.

The thrill of Sandler working with auteurist directors is that they don’t ask him to change his persona. Rather, they push him to be the most fascinating version of himself. As is the case with Barry Egan in Punch-Drunk Love or Danny Meyerowitz in The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), Howard fits squarely within the classic Sandler mold. He’s an unapologetically shouty, emotionally sloppy man-child, but with a dash more (or rather, a hundred dashes more) of recklessness than usual. He’s got hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt all around town, particularly with his brother-in-law (Eric Bogosian), who’s hired a couple of heavies to hound him. But he’s recently come into possession of an extremely valuable precious stone from Ethiopia that could be worth millions. His mixture of predicament and great fortune leads him to broker a potential deal with a precious metal-hungry Garnett, while also dealing with a malfunctioning door buzzer, getting locked while naked in his car trunk, and a wife (Idina Menzel) who can barely stand him. He does also have a much younger girlfriend (Julia Fox) who’s crazy about him, but not in a way that’s particularly healthy for either of them. Anyway, even with all that boiling in the stew, Howard actually has a few opportunities to clear his debt, but he just can’t help himself as he keeps doubling down and going for an even bigger score.

Uncut Gems is a natural companion piece with the Safdies’ last film, 2017’s Good Time, which starred Robert Pattinson and Ben Safdie as a couple of low-level bank-robbing brothers. Uncut Gems matches Good Time for claustrophobia and raises the stakes in terms of catastrophic decision-making, but it allows for the possibility of hope that a happy ending is somehow possible. A lot of that is thanks to Sandler, who when he is actually invested in a performance is so immensely likeable (and is still fairly likeable even when he’s being lazy). It’s not hard to root for Howard. That of course leads to the question, should we really be rooting for him? If all his high-risk decisions work out (and logic dictates that they certainly can), then he’ll never learn to live more reasonably. But at a certain point, with the whirlwind that his life causes everyone around him, I just want it to end. If it all goes wrong for Howard, it also goes wrong for so many people who don’t deserve it. There a few possibilities for how this can all end, all of which are guaranteed to leave you with a ton of adrenaline pumping.

Uncut Gems is Recommended If You Like: Good Time, the NBA playoffs, Colonoscopies set to synth music

Grade: 4.5 out of 5 African Jews

This Is a Movie Review: Robert Pattinson is a Low-Level Bank Robber and Devoted Brother in the Grainy, Queens-Set ‘Good Time’

August 9, 2017

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This review was originally posted on News Cult in August 2017.

Starring: Robert Pattinson, Ben Safdie, Buddy Duress, Taliah Webster, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Barkhad Abdi

Director: Ben and Josh Safdie

Running Time: 99 Minutes

Rating: R for the Vices of a Night in the City

Release Date: August 11, 2017 (Limited)

How far would you go for a better life for yourself and your brother? If said brother is mentally handicapped and you are the lead character in a crime-on-the-streets movie, then chances are the answer is “pretty far.” Ergo, there is no surprise about the general forces that pushes Good Time along, but the details are quite unpredictable.

The majority of the plot follows Connie Nikas (Robert Pattinson) in a desperate night through Queens as he attempts to correct his mistakes and bust his brother Nick (co-director Ben Safdie) out of jail following a botched bank robbery. He first attempts to cover the bail money by turning to a friend/lover (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who is way too old for him and for her own lack of emotional maturity. But another snag pops up when it is revealed that Nick is under police supervision in the hospital. Connie plows forward with his improvisation, but it becomes more and more obvious that he is not going to pull off his scheme, what with law enforcement always nearby and the caprices of fate constantly messing with him. It all adds up to a night of drugs, mistaken identity, and an empty amusement park in a land where cliché need not apply.

The joys of Good Time – and its biggest weakness – are aesthetic. The Safdie brothers exclusively favor extreme close-ups for conversations and kinetic camera movement when characters go from here to there. The shot selection, combined with the grainy digital cinematography and bass-heavy synth score, create a sensorially overwhelming experience that too few films attempt. The photography does get into a bit of trouble whenever the action moves into especially dark corners, rendering it nearly impossible to make out anything that is happening. That is possibly intentional, but it is not advisable. But in a film with this much clarity and consistency of vision, that is only a minor quibble.

Good Time is Recommended If You Like: Robert Pattinson’s auteur collaborations, Miami Vice, The economic desperation of Don’t Breathe

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Dye Packs