Movie Reviews

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

Published

3 months ago

December 22, 2025

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.

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Movie Reviews

Reminders of Him

Published

4 hours ago

March 12, 2026

Press Room

Kenna returns to her hometown after seven years in prison hoping to reunite with her young daughter. Along the way, she starts a sensual new romance even as she is reminded of her lost love. Reminders of Him contains about as much sexual content, coarse language and drug use as you can fit into a PG-13 flick.

Movie Reviews

Film Review: Project Hail Mary – SLUG Magazine

Published

16 hours ago

March 12, 2026

Press Room

Film

Project Hail Mary
Director: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller
Pascal Pictures, General Admission, Lord Miller Productions
In Theaters 03.20.2026

The Oscars for the films of 2025 are this Sunday, and many of the races are tight. If I’m being honest, I’m struggling to care, in part because awards are a poor way to measure art. But mostly because Project Hail Mary is the first major studio release that’s a solid contender for Best Picture of 2026, and I’m far more stoked to see it again than I am to watch a three-hour ceremony.

Science teacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling, Drive, Barbie) awakens alone aboard a spacecraft light-years from Earth with no memory of who he is or how he got there. As fragments of his past slowly return, he realizes he’s the sole survivor of a desperate mission to the Tau Ceti system, sent to find a way to stop a mysterious organism draining energy from the sun and threatening to wipe out life on Earth. Armed only with his scientific know-how, stubborn ingenuity and a growing understanding of the stakes, Grace races to solve an interstellar puzzle that could save humanity. Along the way, he discovers he isn’t quite as alone as he thought — forming an unlikely partnership with an alien visitor he nicknames Rocky (voiced and puppeteered by James Ortiz), whose own world is facing the same cosmic catastrophe. Together, the two forge an extraordinary friendship while tackling a problem that neither species could solve alone.

Project Hail Mary is an adaptation of the bestselling novel by Andy Weir, the author of The Martian, and it’s adapted by the same screenwriter for that film, Drew Goddard. As with The Martian, the script here stays remarkably faithful to the beloved source material, bringing a perfect mix of science, humor and heart. The shadow-drained cinematography by Greig Fraser (Dune, The Batman) is luminous and atmospheric. The Lego Movie directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who were fired from their gig piloting Solo: A Star Wars Story, finally get the chance to prove that not only can they do live action just as well as animation, they belong among the stars. For a story that is so dependent on making hard science accessible and is predicated on the imminent destruction of the planet and the human race, Project Hail Mary manages to be a joyous crowd-pleaser that should find itself scoring with all audiences. It’s as if the cerebral majesty of 2001: A Space Odyssey were mixed with the warmth of a road trip buddy movie, and they sync together perfectly. Daniel Pemberton’s ethereal musical score is filled with such majesty that it would be worth the price of an IMAX ticket just to hear it on a great sound system, and even at 156 minutes, the pacing never lags.

Gosling is becoming one of Hollywood’s most consistently great actors, and he balances the comic and dramatic elements with equal aplomb. The presence of a practical effect for Rocky gives Gosling a stellar performer to play off of, and I’ll be very surprised if we see a more engaging character relationship all year. Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest) brings both an icy aloofness and piercing sense of humanity to the role of Eva Stratt, a Dutch scientist who is in charge of the project, and she continues to blow me away with the depth that she brings to each performance.

Project Hail Mary isn’t just a great movie; it’s a cosmic journey of epic proportions, and it’s nothing short of a cinematic masterpiece. These may be lofty words, and I know that I run the risk of being told “you built it up too high for me,” but when a movie comes along that causes me to lose myself in an all encompassing experience – and I look at the silver through the eyes of a kid who is filled with wonder and has traveled to edges of existence and back again – I’m willing to take that risk. —Patrick Gibbs

Read more film reviews:
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a Timely Warning
Film Review: How to Make a Killing

Movie Reviews

Movie Review – Reminders of Him (2026)

Published

1 day ago

March 11, 2026

Press Room

Reminders of Him, 2026.

Directed by Vanessa Caswill.
Starring Maika Monroe, Tyriq Withers, Rudy Pankow, Lainey Wilson, Lauren Graham, Jennifer Robertson, Zoe Kosovic, Monika Myers, Sindhyar Baloch, Bradley Whitford, Nicholas Duvernay, Jillian Walchuck, Hilary Jardine, Skye MacDonald, Rick Koy, Susan Serrao, Anne Hawthorne, Laird Reghenas, and Kevin Corey.

SYNOPSIS:

After prison, a woman attempts to reconnect with her young daughter but faces resistance from everyone except a bar owner with ties to her child. As they grow closer, she must confront her past mistakes to build a hopeful future.

Given that Maika Monroe’s just-released-from-incarceration Kenna immediately desecrates the gravesite of her love Scotty (which is unintentionally hilariously on the side of the road where a tragic car accident took his life) by stealing the wooden cross (with an inner voice muttering that he hated memorials anyway), tells another character she doesn’t like cats, and complains to someone else that all music is sad and that she doesn’t like it, it’s reasonable to get the impression that the latest adaptation from Colleen Hoover, Reminders of Him, is intentionally aiming for an unlikable lead. Nothing says “get the audience on the side of our protagonist” like all of the above.

The reality is that Maika Monroe is capable enough to inject a modicum of emotion and grounded sincerity even into a Colleen Hoover character, but that, directed by Vanessa Caswill (with Lauren Levine writing the screenplay alongside the author), these are all characters stuck reaching for depth far out of grasp in a hollow romance that is less about someone with a criminal record ingratiating themselves back into society after a seven-year vehicular manslaughter sentence and earning the trust of her dead boyfriend’s parents (Bradley Whitford and Lauren Graham), now the legal guardians of her five-year-old daughter, for visitation rights or anything that would force the novelist (this is her third book translated to screen in as many years) to write an actual character, and more a dull push-pull possible relationship with the former NFL star best friend picking up the pieces, living next door to those grandparents, and assisting taking care of the young girl.

Asking the question “what would it be like to fuck your dead boyfriend’s best friend” should be a hell of a lot more morally thorny and emotionally charged than this. Rather than engage with that, the filmmakers need to dedicate 70 minutes to an outrageously contrived setup in which Kenna and that best friend, Ledger (Tyriq Withers, also visibly trying to express some personality and humanity, but is left hanging by the script), have never met before. Yes, you read that right (and yes, those are the real ridiculous names of these characters, although the latter is presumably intended to honor the late great Heath Ledger, who once starred in romantic dramas and made them a hell of a lot more watchable).

Despite being best friends, Ledger not only never met his best friend’s girlfriend, but he apparently had never even seen a picture of her until her mugshot (which he conveniently forgets, never mind that Maika Monroe looks mostly the same seven years removed) following the car accident on Scotty’s (Rudy Pankow) birthday, which he bailed on for fitness exams in preparation for the NFL draft. In the present, he no longer plays, having “blown out a shoulder”, yet appears physically fine and in no pain during the numerous shirtless scenes and a couple of sexual ones. Before the film gets there, he is skeptical of going anywhere near Kenna once he discovers her identity. Of course, that doesn’t last long because these two hot leads are gravitating toward spending time together.

Much of this is, to put it bluntly, airless and lifeless despite an ensemble trying their best to elevate the proceedings, with what feels like significant chunks of the novel cut out; there is a single flashback to Kenna’s time in prison – being taken under the wing of a mentor of sorts on how to survive – and Scotty is allocated such a minimal screen time that he hardly feels like a character and is never allowed to feel like a presence looming over the story and the choices these characters make. For some reason, there is also a friend Kenna makes here with Down syndrome (Monika Myers) who seems to exist as a vessel for comedic relief, which might have sat better if, once again, there were actually a damn character behind that.

One waits and waits for the inevitable moment where, after snowcone dates and playful arguments about music, there is a release of sexual tension. However, the drama resulting from this is childish, dumb, and resolved about three scenes later. You won’t need a reminder that Reminders of Him, like all Colleen Hoover adaptations thus far, is bad, once again searching for a romantic pulse and eroticism at the expense of characters who feel like actual people or anything that gives weight to the attempts at thorniness.

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

Robert Kojder

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