Marty Supreme

It took me about 48 hours to realize just how much I liked MARTY SUPREME. Josh Safdie's film pummels you with 150 minutes of fascinating/sordid characters, relentless tension and a music score that shouldn't work.

Walking out of the theater, I wasn't sure that the whole thing did.

I knew that Timothee Chalamet absolutely knocked it out of the park, creating yet another character in a cavalcade of diverse performances that seems almost impossible at his age.

Like Daniel Day Lewis in one of my all time faves, "There Will Be Blood", Chalamet crafts a despicable human being that you can't take your eyes of for one moment.

His Marty Mauser is a dream salesman. This kid could sell fire in Hell. As the film opens, he's working in a shoe store where the manager just wants to promote him. Marty's got bigger dreams.

He wants to compete in the global Table Tennis (ping pong) Championships, a dream that no one around him understands. Marty is a ruthless young man and NOTHING is going to get in the way of his dreams.

While you have to admire his passion and the sheer force of his will, he leaves a wake of emotional and physical destruction in his wake.

Safdie is a master at creating an oppressive atmosphere on film. Wherever Marty goes (and he covers the globe) his surroundings always seem too small for his personality. That alternates between hilarity and wince inducing events that threaten everything in his world.

What a ride.

Safdie has put together an amazing cast and team behind the camera.

Gwyneth Paltrow gives her best performance in years as Kay Stone, a fading film star who spins into Marty's orbit and finds it hard to escape. Kay's blockbuster film days are well behind her, but she's getting ready to open a Broadway play as her comeback.

The play is financed by her husband, mega wealthy businessman Milton Rockwell, played in a shockingly great performance by Shark Tank's real life business expert Kevin O'Leary. He's fantastic as a man who always gets what he wants, until he meets Marty. In his acting debut, O'Leary is believable in every moment of an important role, going toe-to-toe with Chalamet and Paltrow and holding his own brilliantly.

Odessa A'zion is also a stunner as Rachel, Marty's girlfriend at home, newly pregnant, devoted to Marty and strapped into a ride that always seems to shock her. But she never backs down. She's a powerhouse and every time I expected her to buckle as the world spins away, she stands taller. I had only seen A'zion in her very funny role as Stephanie, a young prom spectre on CBS' "Ghosts". She's excellent in this dramatic role.

Safdie creates the Lower East Side of NYC in 1952 down to the curtains. He fills every room with characters that pop. Angry, loud, rude, loving, strange, they cover a very dark spectrum.

The music score by Daniel Lopatin is another character in the film. Ten minutes in I hated it. It feels like a soundtrack from an early 80's action flick dropped into a 1950's film. But it works. Beautifully.

Casting director Jennifer Venditti (Uncut Gems) deserves credit for the craziest and best casting of the year. How she found O'Leary is a story in itself, but she's compiled acting veterans, newcomers, playwright David Mamet, rapper Tyler the Creator and at least three basketball players into one of the most eclectic, rewarding casts of 2025.

I barely recognized Penn Jillette as a farmer who gets dragged into the third act, double barrel shotgun blazing. Unexpected.

At the blazing core of all the madness is Chalamet's Marty Mauser. What a douche this guy is, defiling monuments and lives wherever he goes. So how did I find myself in the finale cheering so hard for his success? Great writing and superb acting, clearly.

Chalamet practiced table tennis for years for the role, and it shows, but he's also transformed his persona, his "being" from the powerful Paul Atreides in "Dune", Bob Dylan or the quirky Willy Wonka into a skinny, barely past acne, brute force of will on display here.

MARTY SUPREME is a two and half hour, blazing panic attack with pauses in the action that stun. If you would have asked me when I walked out of the theater if I liked it, my response would have been, "I don't know yet, maybe."

48 hours later, I couldn't stop thinking about how brilliant the structure, acting and writing are.

It's just outside my favorite films of 2025, an original experience that continues to create a legacy for Chalamet as one of our most versatile actors.

It gets an A.