Entertainment

Hollywood has been on a mystery binge. Now, pick a murder of your choice

Published

2 years ago

January 14, 2024

Hollywood has been on a mystery binge. Now, pick a murder of your choice

The mystery story is a relatively recent innovation, whether dated from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” with its amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin, or Wilkie Collins’ 1868 novel “The Moonstone,” which established many of the conventions still in use today, or even the 1887 debut of Sherlock Holmes, so popular that his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, could not kill him. But the form has made up for lost time, with mystery series filling entire bookstores and invading every other storytelling platform — theater, film, radio and perhaps most prolifically, television, where it has held fast while other genres have come and gone. It’s fantastically adaptable. Comedy, tragedy, cozy, gritty, formulaic, metafictional, historical, futuristic, highbrow, lowbrow, middle brow — something for every taste.

The advantage of a mystery, from a broadcaster or streamer’s perspective is that no matter the quality, viewers, once even a little invested, will stick around until the end just to find out who did it, or how they did it, or why they did it, even though the solution may be the least interesting aspect of the tale; often, if not inevitably, it will be a version of something you have seen before, there being a relatively few reasons people kill one another, and ways to do it, and to establish a phony alibi. This doesn’t really matter much, because above all, a mystery is an armature on which to hang a bunch of distinct, disparate characters, without the necessity of character development. (Though that is certainly allowed.) And because in this world, familiarity counts as novelty.

Although the mystery is evergreen, we seem to be in a period of expansion. Why? The pop psychologist in me would suggest in a world without answers to crises in the near and the long term, they propose successful solutions, based on demonstrable facts, arrived at through human intelligence. Tension is released instead of ongoing. And villains typically, though not always, get their comeuppance.

The critic in me, on the other hand, would observe that in follow-the-leader Hollywood, success breeds imitation, or repetition. On the big screen we have lately had Rian Johnson‘s “Knives Out” and “Glass Onion” and Kenneth Branagh‘s Hercule Poirot adaptations. On television, we’ve seen “A Murder at the End of the World,” Agatha Christie for the 2020s; Natasha Lyonne’s “Columbo”-inspired “Poker Face” (created by Johnson); “Dark Winds,” set in the 1970s, starring Zahn McClarnon as a Navajo tribal police chief; the satirical yet tightly structured “The Afterparty,” with Tiffany Haddish as its eccentric gumshoe. Even “Wednesday” was a mystery story, with Charles Addams’ dour teen its dark Nancy Drew, played by Jenna Ortega. And the starry comedy “Only Murders in the Building” is getting a secondary airing on ABC — strike-related, but whatever — after three seasons on Hulu, with a fourth to come.

In the space of a single week, four prestige major mysteries of different flavors, each with its particular pleasures, have premiered or are about to. There is “Night Country,” the fourth season of “True Detective” (HBO, Sunday) — I would call it long-awaited, but I’m not sure anyone expected to see it again — set within a sunless Arctic Circle, with Jodie Foster and Kali Reis its philosophically contrary investigators; “Monsieur Spade” (AMC, Sunday), from Scott Frank (“The Queen’s Gambit”) and Tom Fontana (“Oz”), which finds Dashiell Hammett‘s detective, played by Clive Owen, living in the south of France two decades after “The Maltese Falcon”; the fanciful, oceangoing “Death and Other Details” (Hulu, Tuesday) with Mandy Patinkin as the “world’s greatest detective,” maybe; and “Criminal Report” (Apple+, now streaming), in which London police detectives Cush Jumbo and Peter Capaldi clash over a possible miscarriage of justice.

Kali Reis, left, and Jodie Foster in HBO’s “True Detective: Night Country.”

(Michele K. Short/HBO)

The excellent “True Detective: Night Country” leads this pack. The anthology series, created by the novelist Nic Pizzolatto, began as an HBO-brand elevation of the police procedural, a metaphysical whodunit in which the dialectical double act of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, a refined version of the odd-coupling seen in “Beverly Hills Cop” and countless other cop adventures — was the real subject of the show, or in any case, the reason for its success. The current season, created, directed and mostly written by the Mexican writer and director Issa López (“Tigers Are Not Afraid”), seems fashioned to follow closely in the footsteps of the first, but now those footsteps are tracking through the snow.

There are the same scenes of the principals driving and talking and the presentation of differing points of view, one more empirical, one more spiritual. There is the recurring, sometimes chilling presence of a mysterious folk symbol, “older than the ice probably.” And there is one reference so specific that it can only be described as fan service.

Set in the fictional Alaskan small town of Ennis, the story begins on the day of the last sunset before night moves in for six months, and runs through Christmas and New Year’s. Snowbound crime shows are nothing new, but given the demands and costs of production, they are uncommon, and special. And there’s something beautifully unsettling about all the darkness surrounding this isolated town, an environment that, without the proper gear, will kill you, and where it always seems to be the same time of day, or night.

“Tigers Are Not Afraid” was a horror film shot through with magic realism, and both those elements find a home in “Night Country.” Indeed, it begins more like a horror movie than a crime show, with a herd of suddenly stampeding reindeer, and then a delivery man discovering that the scientists at a remote research station, whose exact business no one seems to know, have all disappeared, leaving the legend “WE ARE ALL DEAD” written on a white board. (There is no actual on-screen violence in the show, but plenty of shocking images and an ongoing sense of dread. (You breathe a sigh of relief whenever someone enters a space where the lights are on and people are around.)

A severed tongue discovered on the site seems to link the disappearance to the unsolved murder of an Indigenous midwife and activist. It piques the interest of trooper Evangeline Navarro (Reis), who brings her suspicions to Ennis police chief Liz Danvers (Foster). Navarro and Danvers, physical and philosophical opposites, though they share a consuming doggedness, have a lot of old business, which will be revealed through the season, and explain much — though not everything will be explained. Foster is every bit as good as anyone who has paid her the least bit of attention since the Disney days would expect her to be; but Reis, a boxer only recently turned actor, is terrific as well.

Echoing the investigators’ conversations about the living and the dead, God and the beyond, the show plays along the lines of the natural and the supernatural, without fully throwing in with either — it leaves some things mysterious and open to discussion; that Rose (Fiona Shaw), the local bohemian, actually sees her dead husband, is merely a fact in this world, but at the same time people do things for human reasons. This isn’t a story of demons.

Ennis is one of those small isolated communities where everyone knows everyone or knows someone who does, but at the same time is afflicted by a general air of loneliness and disconnection. Even as the investigation proceeds, by fits and starts, we are involved in various well-drawn (or sketched) family and relationship and community dramas. Danvers’ teenage stepdaughter (Isabella Star LaBlanc) wants to explore her Indigenous heritage, much to Danvers’ unexplained displeasure; deputy Peter Prior (Finn Bennett) is devoted to his boss and his job to the point of endangering his marriage, and his relationship with his underling policeman father (John Hawkes); Navarro’s younger sister Julia (Aki Niviâna) has mental health issues. And this is certainly not the first mystery story in which corporate interests — the local mine — are set against the needs of the people. (See: “Dark Winds.”) It has political resonance, but it’s also the most commonplace element in a largely extraordinary series.

Clive Owen as Sam Spade in AMC’s “Monsieur Spade.”

(Jean-Claude Lother/AMC)

“Monsieur Spade” begins in the mid-1950s, as the San Francisco detective attempts to deliver the daughter of the late Brigid O’Shaughnessy — the femme fatale Spade delivers to justice at the end of the “The Maltese Falcon,” who, in this world, has subsequently gone free and later died — to her father in a small town in the south of France. The story then jumps ahead into the early 1960s; Spade, who has traded his suit and fedora for polo shirts and sunglasses, is now a French-speaking, amiable member of the community, a rich widower who fills his bags at the farmers market, pets local dogs and swims naked in his swimming pool. Teresa (Cara Bossom), the daughter, is a sullen, clever, dangerously independent teenager living in a convent, where Spade pays for her keep. And then things get nutty, with six murdered nuns, a mad monk and an Algerian golden child over whom various parties fight for possession. (The Algerian War has recently concluded, and it’s an issue here.)

Owen is the right age and shape and can do the accent, but it does seem odd not to have cast an American actor in this quintessentially American role. Unlike Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and most every other literary detective, Spade’s fame is based on a single book and film, which makes Humphrey Bogart inseparable from the character, even as it’s unfair to reckon another actor against him. (It’s impossible to imagine Bogart submitting to a prostate examination on-screen, as Clive Owen does here, though that is, of course, the point.) Owen studied Bogart’s speech patterns for the role, but he lacks his music; his portrayal is oddly static, his delivery so dry as to be almost monotonal. His Spade is forever cracking wise, but few of his remarks register as funny, either to this viewer or his interlocutors. (“Do you know where the word ‘sabotage’ comes from?” “The dictionary.”) It occurred to me that this might be intentional, to signify his being a man out of his time or place, but that feels like overthinking; the effect in any case is to render the character oddly inert, as busy as the screenplay keeps him. Still, the angrier or more frustrated or active Spade grows, the more effective Owen becomes, which does pep up the later episodes.

And, as in “The Maltese Falcon,” he is only one of a colorful cast of characters, including an impressive Bossom, a very appealing Denis Ménochet as the local police chief, who merits a series of his own; Louise Bourgoin as Marguerite, a Juliette Gréco-esque singer with whom Spade co-owns a bar; and Matthew Beard and Rebecca Root as Spade’s new British neighbors who don’t seem for a moment to be who they claim and might loosely be termed the Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre of the piece. Whatever the demerits of Owen’s performance, it isn’t fatal to an enjoyable series; he gets the job done, and is particularly good in his scenes with Bossom, whose Teresa he regards with paternal annoyance. And the series departs on a final shot and line so lovely it’s worth the getting there.

Violett Beane and Mandy Patinkin in Hulu’s “Death and Other Details.”

(Michael Desmond/HULU)

“Death and Other Details” is a Christie-style country house mystery in which the country house is a sort of bespoke ocean liner, chartered by the Collier family, who are using the occasion to pitch a business deal to Chinese investors, with whom various Colliers also have personal relationships. (It’s a cavalcade of personal relationships.) Among the travelers are Imogene Scott (Violett Beane), the Colliers’ ward, who as a child saw her mother blown up in a car in the Colliers’ driveway, and Rufus Coteworth (Patinkin), a detective who reneged on his promise to the girl to find the killers. In the course of the series, the two will go, I don’t need to tell you, from adversaries to collaborators. There is a lot of hanky-panky going on among the main characters — the ship is filled with extras who have no influence on the story — and a little romance and a lot of relationship issues, which means you do not have to wait long for a sex scene. The series hops around a lot in time and memory — Rufus and Imogene appear as witnesses in one another’s flashbacks — and is not perfectly plausible, in big and little ways, but its energy and reveals upon reveals make that moot. Patinkin, in an indefinable accent, is his usual Big Presence, but Beane holds her own, and the arrival of Linda Emond as Interpol agent Hilde Eriksen pays constant comic dividends.

Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo in Apple TV+’s “Criminal Record.”

(Apple TV+)

The absorbing “Criminal Record” takes us to modern-day London, and has that quality of crisp reality peculiar to British series (see also: “Slow Horses”); it’s not a documentary feel, but there are few layers of cinematic gloss separating the view from the viewed, and as a result one feels closer to the characters, the action and the environment. The locations are appropriate; the details of a police station and the institutional bureaucracy feel exactly right. The series has a persuasive immediacy.

The story begins with an anonymous call to the police from a woman, fearing for her life from a violent boyfriend, in the course of which she tells the operator that he’s claimed responsibility for a murder for which another man sits in prison. This falls into the lap of Detective Sergeant June Lenker (Jumbo), who runs with it farther than any of her associates would like, particularly the original investigator, Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Hegarty (Capaldi), a respected officer who clearly has something to hide and, remembering the case, describes the convicted Errol Matthis as “the poor man’s O.J.” (“Excuse me?” asks Lenker, to no response.) He’s calm and collected; she’s impulsive and patient, with a tendency to alienate her colleagues, bend and break rules and a disinclination to wait for backup — support is always too many minutes away — charging into dangerous situations with sometimes bad results.

The narrative proceeds with the usual red herrings, flurries of action and suspense and unsuspected revelations, some of which are telegraphed long before the moment they’re meant to take us by surprise. Answers will be forthcoming, but, as with “True Detective,” the real mystery resides within individuals, and how they are with one another — not only the relationship between Lenker and Hegarty, working sometimes together, and sometimes against each other, but between parents and children and partners. And Capaldi and Jumbo work beautifully together. There’s no mystery in that.

Movie Reviews

Movie Review – The Testament of Ann Lee (2025)

Published

3 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Press Room

The Testament of Ann Lee, 2025.

Directed by Mona Fastvold.
Starring Amanda Seyfried, Lewis Pullman, Thomasin McKenzie, Matthew Beard, Christopher Abbott, David Cale, Stacy Martin, Scott Handy, Jeremy Wheeler, Tim Blake Nelson, Daniel Blumberg, Jamie Bogyo, Viola Prettejohn, Natalie Shinnick, Shannon Woodward, Millie-Rose Crossley, Willem van der Vegt, Esmee Hewett, Harry Conway, Benjamin Bagota, Maria Sand, Scott Alexander Young, Matti Boustedt, George Taylor, Alexis Latham, Lark White, Viktória Dányi, and Roy McCrerey.

SYNOPSIS:

Ann Lee, the founding leader of the Shaker Movement, proclaimed as the female Christ by her followers. Depicts her establishment of a utopian society and the Shakers’ worship through song and dance, based on real events.

The second coming of Christ was a woman. Narrated as a story of legend and constructed as a cinematic epic, co-writer/director Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee tells the story of the eponymous 18th-century preacher who occasionally experienced divine visions guiding her on how to teach her and her followers to free themselves and be absolved of sin.

This group, an offshoot of Quakers known as Shakers, did so by stimulating and intoxicating full-body rhythmic dancing movements set to many hymns beautifully sung by Amanda Seyfried and others. The key distinction between the group, and arguably the toughest selling point of the film aside from the religious nature of it all, is that Ann Lee asserted that the only way to achieve such pure holiness is by giving up all sexual relations, living a life of celibacy (as evident by some laughter during the CIFF festival screening when she made this decree, which quickly subsided as it is relatively easy to buy into her mission and convictions).

It shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise that Mona Fastvold had trouble getting this one off the ground. Perhaps what finally secured the project’s financial backing was all those awards The Brutalist (directed by her husband Brady Corbet and co-written by her, flipping those duties and credits this time around) either won or was nominated for, which was notably another film that almost no one had interest in making. The point is that this should serve as a reminder that there is an audience for anything and everything.

Whether one doesn’t care about religious movements or is a nonbeliever, The Testament of Ann Lee is remarkably hypnotic in its craftsmanship. It features a flat-out career-best performance from Amanda Seyfried, who blends all of her strengths as an actor and unleashes them at the peak of her talent. Yes, there are moments of tragedy and trauma, but the film refuses to wallow in misery, chartering her Shakers movement with hope, miracles, and perseverance as the journey takes them from Manchester to Niskayuna, New York, in search of expanding their follower base while dealing with other setbacks within the movement and personally.

Chronicling Ann Lee’s life with precise editing that rarely drags (and mostly fixates on the early stages of the Shakers movement and decade-plus long attempt to battle sexism as a female preacher and find a foothold amidst escalating tensions between British and Americans), the film also offers insight into the events that gave her a repulsion for sexual intimacy, her marriage with blacksmith Abraham (Christopher Abbott), and dynamics with her most loyal supporters which includes brother William (Lewis Pullman) and Mary (Thomasin Mckenzie, also serving as the narrator). Given the unfortunate nature of how most women, especially wives, were expected to have zero agency compared to their male counterparts and deliver babies, it is also organically inspiring watching her find a group with similar beliefs willing to trust her visions and take up celibacy. Whether or not all of them succeed is part of the journey and, interestingly enough, shows who is genuinely loyal and in her corner.

This is no dry biopic, though. Instead, it is brimming with life and energy, mainly through those “shaking” sequences depicting those outstandingly choreographed seizure-like dance numbers (typically shot by William Rexer from an elevated overhead angle, looking down at an entire room, capturing a ridiculous amount of motions all weaving together and creating something uniformly spellbinding). The songs throughout are divinely performed, adding another layer to this film’s transfixing pull. Nearly every image is sublime, right up until the perfect final shot. Admittedly, the film loses a bit of steam in the third act as one awaits a grim confrontation with naysayers who feel threatened by her position, movement, and pacifism regarding the burgeoning American Revolution.

Still, whatever reservations one has about watching a religious movement preaching peace and celibacy while laboring away building a utopia (an aspect that puts it in great juxtaposition with The Brutalist) will wash away like sin. That’s the power of the movies; even someone who isn’t religious will find it hard not to be swept up in Ann Lee’s life. Fact, fiction, bluff… it doesn’t matter; the material is treated with conviction and non-judgmental respect. In The Testament of Ann Lee, Amanda Seyfried channels that for something holy, empowering, infectious, and all around breathtaking.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist

Entertainment

The 5 best science books of 2025

Published

5 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Press Room

It’s been an uneasy year for science. While there were significant milestones, like breakthroughs in gene editing for rare diseases and novel insights into early human evolution (including fire-making), the U.S. science community at large was rocked by institutional challenges. Drastic federal cuts froze thousands of research grants, and the Trump administration began actively working to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Meanwhile, fraudulent scientific research papers are on the rise — casting a shadow over academic integrity.

Our picks for this year’s best in arts and entertainment.

Thankfully, we can still turn to our bookshelves — and podcasts — to ground us. We tapped science doyenne Alie Ward, the host of the funny cult favorite “Ologies” podcast, to share her picks for the best science books of 2025.

Spanning fascinating subjects from bees to human anatomy, Ward’s insightful list reminds us that books remain a timeless vessel for truth and knowledge.

“Ferns: Lessons in Survival From Earth’s Most Adaptable Plants”
By Fay-Wei Li and Jacob S. Suissa
Hardie Grant Books: 192 pages, $45

“Dr. Li is the botanist of our dreams… the way he talks about ferns and why he loves them, and about growing up in Taiwan (in essentially a fern forest), and how the sexual reproduction of ferns has been a great way to draw attention to the LGBTQ and nonbinary community is so charming and funny. They even named a whole genus after Lady Gaga because they were listening to ‘Born This Way’ a lot in the lab and also because there are sequences in their DNA that are ‘GAGA.’

“Laura Silburn’s illustrations are gorgeous — they really put a lot of texture into some of these plants that are really tiny. Every page is like looking at a botany poster. As we’ve seen so much science research being underfunded, especially in the last year, there’s this big question by the culture at large of why does it matter? Why does studying the fern genome matter? It has real-world impacts — that’s fewer pesticides on your crops because we figured out something from a foreign genome. I always love when something is overlooked or taken for granted and because of someone’s passion and their dedication to studying it, we learn that it can change our lives.”

“The ABCs of California’s Native Bees”
By Krystle Hickman
Heyday: 240 pages, $38

“Krystle is an astounding photographer and an incredible visual artist. Her passion for native bees is infectious. A lot of people, when they think of bees, they think of honeybees. And honeybees are not even native to North America. They’re not native to L.A. They’re not native to this country. They’re feral livestock. What I love about her book is it opens your eyes to all of these species that are literally right under our noses that we wouldn’t even consider — and that a lot of people wouldn’t even identify as bees.

“The other reason why I love this book is that she puts these essays into it that are about her experiences going to find the bees. So you’re getting to see these gorgeous landscape pictures. You’re getting to see what it took to find the bee, how to look for it, and more about this particular species. It’s organized in these ABCs that you can pick up at any chapter and check out a bee you’ve never heard of before.”

“Humanish: What Talking to Your Cat or Naming Your Car Reveals About the Uniquely Human Need to Humanize”

By Justin Gregg

Little, Brown: 304 pages, $30

“Justin is hilarious. He is such a good writer, and his voice is really, really approachable. The way that he writes about science is through such a wonderful pop culture and pop science lens. You feel like you’re reading a friend’s email who just has something really interesting to tell you.

“This book is all about anthropomorphizing everything from our toasters to why we like some spiders but hate other spiders. This is a discussion that is so important in this time when we literally have bots on our phones that are like, ‘I’ll be your best friend.’

“Justin speaks to human psychology and our need to want to be friends or villainize objects —or technology or animals — and project our own humanity onto them in ways that are sometimes helpful and sometimes dangerous.

“As a science communicator, you can tell people the most fascinating facts and can give them the best stories. But unless you can give people a takeaway, then a lot of times it doesn’t stick or the interest isn’t there. He really addresses the question of ‘Well, what does this mean for my life?’”

“Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy”
By Mary Roach
W.W. Norton & Co: 288 pages, $28.99

“I’m a long term simp for Mary Roach.

“The humanity that she brings is such a wonderful base for how our bodies fail us sometimes and what we are trying to do to bring them back. From her being present during orthopedic surgeries and the way that she describes the sound of hammer on bone (and just the kind of jovial atmosphere in an operating room that, as a patient, you would never be clued in about because you are passed out half dead on a slab). She really soaks up a vibe that you would never have access to. She goes to Mongolia to learn about eye surgery there in yurts. She takes you to places you would never be able to go. She’s rooting around in archives and old papers — she just makes anything interesting.

“Mary really is both an ally and an outsider, and I think that that’s a really beautiful thing in her book.”

“The Double Tax: How Women of Color Are Overcharged and Underpaid”
By Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman
Portfolio: 256 pages, $29

“Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman is an absolute force. I’ve followed her work in economics and in equity for years, and I was really excited for this book to come out. We did an episode on kalology, which is the study of beauty standards, years ago and I have always loved the conversation of how different members of society have a certain tax on them — these extra resources that they are expected to provide.

“I was really excited to read about specifically women of color, because that is something that I don’t feel is discussed at large. Anna combines the sociology of it with the reality of her experience and other women of color. Because she is so deft when it comes to policy and economics, she also considers, ‘What can we do about this?’ It’s not just enough to discuss this, but what can be done?

“She has totals of what the gender gap is and what the double tax is, and it’s written up like a receipt. This book really addresses the double tax in a way that, even if you have no insight or it’s something that you haven’t thought about — or you are someone who hasn’t experienced this — it’s laying it out economically in a way that is really accessible and has a lot of impact.”

Recinos is an arts and culture journalist and creative nonfiction writer based in Los Angeles. Her first essay collection, “Underneath the Palm Trees,” is forthcoming in early 2027.

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: An electric Timothée Chalamet is the consummate striver in propulsive ‘Marty Supreme’

Published

16 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Press Room

Movie Review: An electric Timothée Chalamet is the consummate striver in propulsive ‘Marty Supreme’

“Everybody wants to rule the world,” goes the Tears for Fears song we hear at a key point in “Marty Supreme,” Josh Safdie’s nerve-busting adrenaline jolt of a movie starring a never-better Timothée Chalamet.

But here’s the thing: everybody may want to rule the world, but not everybody truly believes they CAN. This, one could argue, is what separates the true strivers from the rest of us.

And Marty — played by Chalamet in a delicious synergy of actor, role and whatever fairy dust makes a performance feel both preordained and magically fresh — is a striver. With every fiber of his restless, wiry body. They should add him to the dictionary definition.

Needless to say, Marty is a New Yorker.

Also needless to say, Chalamet is a New Yorker.

And so is Safdie, a writer-director Chalamet has called “the street poet of New York.” So, where else could this story be set?

It’s 1952, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Marty Mauser is a salesman in his uncle’s shoe store, escaping to the storeroom for a hot tryst with his (married) girlfriend. Suddenly we’re seeing footage of sperm traveling — talk about strivers! — up to an egg. Which morphs, of course, into a pingpong ball.

This witty opening sequence won’t be the only thing recalling “Uncut Gems,” co-directed by Safdie with his brother Benny before the two split for solo projects. That film, which feels much like the precursor to “Marty Supreme,” began as a trip through the shiny innards of a rare opal, only to wind up inside Adam Sandler’s colon, mid-colonoscopy.

Sandler’s Howard Ratner was a New York striver, too, but sadder, and more troubled. Marty is young, determined, brash — with an eye always to the future. He’s a great salesman: “I could sell shoes to an amputee,” he boasts, crassly. But what he’s plotting to unveil to the world has nothing to do with shoes. It’s about table tennis.

This image released by A24 shows Timothée Chalamet in a scene from “Marty Supreme.” (A24 via AP)

How likely is it that this Jewish kid from the Lower East Side can become the very face of a sport in America, soon to be “staring at you from the cover of a Wheaties box?”

To Marty, perfectly likely. Still, he knows nobody in the U.S. cares about table tennis. He’s so determined to prove everyone wrong, starting at the British Open in London, that when there’s a snag obtaining cash for his trip, he brandishes a gun at a colleague to get it.

Shaking off that sorta-armed robbery thing, Marty arrives in London, where he fast-talks his way into a suite at the Ritz. Here, he spies fellow guest Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow, in a wise, stylish return to the screen), a former movie star married to an insufferable tycoon (“Shark Tank” personality Kevin O’Leary, one of many nonactors here.)

Kay’s skeptical, but Marty finds a way to woo her. Really, all he has to say is: “Come watch me.” Once she sees him play, she’s sneaking into his room in a lace corselet.

This image released by A24 shows Gwyneth Paltrow in a scene from “Marty Supreme.” (A24 via AP)

This would be a good time to stop and consider Chalamet’s subtly transformed appearance. He is stick-thin — duh, he never stops moving. His mustache is skimpy. His skin is acne-scarred — just enough to erase any movie-star sheen. Most strikingly, his eyes, behind the round spectacles, are beady — and smaller. Definitely not those movie-star eyes.

But then, nearly all the faces in “Marty Supreme” are extraordinary. In a movie with more than 100 characters, we have known actors (Fran Drescher, Abel Ferrara); nonacting personalities (O’Leary, and an excellent Tyler Okonma (Tyler, The Creator) as Marty’s friend Wally); and exciting newcomers like Odessa A’Zion as Marty’s feisty girlfriend Rachel.

There are also a slew of nonactors in small parts, plus cameos from the likes of David Mamet and even high wire artist Philippe Petit. The dizzying array makes one curious how it all came together — is casting director Jennifer Venditti taking interns? Production notes tell us that for one hustling scene at a bowling alley, young men were recruited from a sports trading-card convention.

Elsewhere on the creative team, composer Daniel Lopatin succeeds in channelling both Marty’s beating heart and the ricochet of pingpong balls in his propulsive score. The script by Safdie and cowriter Ronald Bronstein, loosely based on real-life table tennis hustler Marty Reisman, beats with its own, never-stopping pulse. The same breakneck aesthetic applies to camera work by Darius Khondji.

Back now to London, where Marty makes the finals against Japanese player Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, like his character a deaf table tennis champion). “I’ll be dropping a third atom bomb on them,” he brags — not his only questionable World War II quip. But Endo, with his unorthodox paddle and grip, prevails.

After a stint as a side act with the Harlem Globetrotters, including pingpong games with a seal — you’ll have to take our word for this, folks, we’re running low on space — Marty returns home, determined to make the imminent world championships in Tokyo.

But he’s in trouble — remember he took cash at gunpoint? Worse, he has no money.

So Marty’s on the run. And he’ll do anything, however messy or dangerous, to get to Japan. Even if he has to totally debase himself (mark our words), or endanger friends — or abandon loyal and brave Rachel.

This image released by A24 shows Odessa A'zion in a scene from — This image released by A24 shows Odessa A’zion in a scene from “Marty Supreme.” (A24 via AP)

Is there something else for Marty, besides his obsessive goal? If so, he doesn’t know it yet. But the lyrics of another song used in the film are instructive here: “Everybody’s got to learn sometime.”

So can a single-minded striver ultimately learn something new about his own life?

We’ll have to see. As Marty might say: “Come watch me.”

“Marty Supreme,” an A24 release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for language throughout, sexual content, some violent content/bloody images and nudity.” Running time: 149 minutes. Four stars out of four.