If someone had told me five years ago that the most exciting American movie of 2025 would be about table tennis, I would have asked what they’d been drinking. And then I would have remembered that the most exciting American movie of 2019 was about a jeweler trying to collect on a bet, and that the same director made both films, and I would have shut up and bought my ticket.
Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme” is now streaming on HBO Max. It landed yesterday. If you missed it in theaters over the winter, this is your weekend. Clear two and a half hours. Turn off your phone. You won’t need it.
The film stars Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser, a shoe salesman in 1950s New York who plays table tennis the way some people breathe, as if stopping would kill him. Mauser is loosely based on Marty Reisman, the real-life champion who won more than twenty major titles and once toured with the Harlem Globetrotters doing a ping pong comedy act. Safdie and his co-writer Ronald Bronstein take Reisman’s life as a starting point and then build something that is less biography than fever dream. This is a movie about ambition so consuming that it eats everything around it and still comes back hungry.
This is Safdie’s first feature as a solo director. He and his brother Benny made “Good Time” in 2017 and “Uncut Gems” in 2019, and if you’ve seen either of those films, you know what you’re getting into. You’re getting into a movie that grabs you by the collar in the first ten minutes and does not let go. “Uncut Gems” did this with Adam Sandler as a diamond district hustler making one terrible bet after another. “Marty Supreme” does it with Chalamet as a kid who believes he can beat anyone alive at a game most people consider recreation, not sport, and who might be right.
Chalamet is extraordinary in this. I’ve watched him develop over the past decade, from the quiet teenager in “Call Me by Your Name” to the movie star who carried “Dune” on his shoulders, and this is the performance where everything he’s been learning comes together. He plays Mauser as a man made almost entirely of nerve. There is something happening behind his eyes in every scene, calculations and hunger and a refusal to accept any outcome that isn’t total victory. It is the kind of performance that makes you forget you’re watching an actor. I do not say that often. I have seen a lot of acting.
The film earned nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won none of them. I mention this not because the Oscars are the final word on anything. They aren’t. But it tells you the kind of movie this is. “Goodfellas” lost Best Picture to “Dances with Wolves.” “Raging Bull” lost to “Ordinary People.” The movies that burn with this specific intensity tend to make voters nervous. They reach for something gentler, something that sits more comfortably in the chest. The voters are wrong, and in ten years nobody will remember what won. They will remember this.
The supporting cast deserves more than a passing mention. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Kay Stone, a wealthy socialite whose involvement with Mauser brings a whole different register into the film. She is elegant and calculating, and the scenes between her and Chalamet crackle with the energy of two people who want different things from each other and know it. It is the best work Paltrow has done in years. Tyler, the Creator plays Wally, a taxi driver and Mauser’s friend, and he brings an unforced naturalism to every scene he’s in that proves the man can act, not just perform. Abel Ferrara shows up as a criminal figure, and if you know who Ferrara is, you will understand why his presence in a movie about underground competition in 1950s New York is both perfect and a little bit of a private joke.
I need to be honest about the runtime. Two hours and twenty-nine minutes is a lot of movie. Safdie uses nearly all of it well, but there are stretches in the middle act where the film wanders into the details of Mauser’s romantic life, and I found my attention shifting in a way it never does during the ping pong sequences. The romance isn’t bad. It just isn’t what the film does best, and you can feel the energy drop when we leave the table. This is a small complaint about a movie that gets most things right, but I respect your Friday evening enough to mention it.
Here is who this movie is for. If you like films that move fast and hit hard and leave you feeling like you just ran somewhere, watch this tonight. If you liked “Uncut Gems” and wished Adam Sandler would make more movies like that, you will find the same energy here, channeled through a different story but recognizably from the same restless mind. If you’re interested in the specific phenomenon of a young person who is absurdly good at one thing and builds their entire identity around it, for better and worse, this movie understands that phenomenon better than any film I’ve seen in years.
Here is who should skip it. If two and a half hours sounds like a commitment you aren’t prepared to make on a Friday evening, I understand completely, and I will not judge you for it. If you need your movies to resolve neatly and send you home feeling settled, this one will not do that. It earns its ending, but the ending asks something of you. The language is rough throughout, and the behavior is rougher. Mauser is not always a likable person. He is always an interesting one, and I think that’s worth more, but your tolerance may differ from mine.
If you watch “Marty Supreme” this weekend and find yourself wanting more, let me point you toward a companion piece. “The Hustler,” from 1961, directed by Robert Rossen, stars Paul Newman as “Fast Eddie” Felson, a pool player trying to hustle his way to a match against the great Minnesota Fats, played by Jackie Gleason. It is the same essential story. A brash young talent in a seedy competitive subculture, burning so hot he scorches everyone near him. Newman and Chalamet are playing the same kind of man, separated by sixty-four years of cinema, and watching them side by side makes both performances richer. “The Hustler” is available on most rental platforms. If you have the weekend for both, you won’t regret the five hours.
“Marty Supreme” is streaming now on HBO Max. Go watch it tonight.
