Marty Supreme (2025)

I saw many people mention Marty Supreme as a film in a similar vein to Uncut Gems. I would disagree. I think it's actually more in line with Inside Llewyn Davis. While not looking at grief in the way that film does, it gives us a central character who keeps making himself into the biggest obstacle to his potential success.

Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a young man who fancies himself as the world greatest table tennis player. Nobody else really thinks there's a future in that though, and very few people view it as a sport. Marty cannot really afford the life of a dedicated sportsman, which is why he spends some of his time hustling others with his friend, Wally (Tyler Okonma AKA Tyler The Creator). He also spends some of his time being far too intimate with the married Rachel (Odessa A'zion), but ends up in the orbit of an actress searching for a comeback (Kay Stone, played by Gwyneth Paltrow), her rich husband (Milton Rockwell, played by Kevin O'Leary), and a gangster (Abel Ferrara) with a stash of cash and a need for someone to temporarily care for his dog.

Directed by Josh Safdie, who also co-wrote the screenplay with regular collaborator Ronald Bronstein, this manages to play fast and loose within the confines of the sports movie structure, yet also give viewers something that hits a couple of very familiar beats. Based loosely on the real-life Marty Reisman, this keeps us alongside someone strangely captivating, despite being so selfish and loathsome, in a 1950s world accompanied by an enjoyably anachronistic soundtrack (although I was very dissappointed that "Just A Song About Ping Pong" wasn't used). While things go from bad to worse for Marty, he's so consistently self-destructive that any potential bad end feels absolutely expected, and even slightly deserved, removing some of the tension that would otherwise be thrumming throughout every scene.

Chalamet is absolutely superb in the main role, giving an impressively vanity-free performance that sees him playing the lousiest character he's yet played onscreen (and, let's not forget, he played a damn cannibal in one of his previous features). A'zion is also very good, and does well in her scenes with Chalamet to make you believe that she sees something in him that others may miss. Paltrow and O'Leary are both excellent, and both get scenes that allow them to steal the spotlight away from our main character for at least a moment or two, and Okonma excels in his supporting role. Ferrara is a lot of fun, being as mean and dangerous as can be, and there are also damn fine performances from Larry Ratso Sloman, Fran Drescher (who I wish had been in it for a bit longer), Isaac Simon, Penn Jillette, Luke Manley, and Koto Kawaguchi.

There's an excellent score from Daniel Lopatin, great production design throughout that keeps you grounded in 1950s New York (despite those soundtrack choices), and a necessarily impressive display of table tennis in a few main sequences. Some will find it insufferable, because of Marty being so insufferable, but I hope that most will find it as compelling and entertaining as I did. I may not rush to rewatch it, but I AM still thinking about some key moments that won't be leaving my memory any time soon. The fact that the tension feels slightly less palpable, undercut by the personality of Marty, actually makes it a more enjoyable viewing experience than it otherwise would have been. 

Oh, and it may have one of the best opening credit sequences of all time.

9/10

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Netflix And Chill: Good Time (2017)

Love or hate the Safdie brothers, and I definitely lean more towards the former, an interesting thing about them is seeing their natural and unrelenting growth as they have moved from short films to small features, eventually getting themselves to a position where they can work with people such as Robert Pattinson and Adam Sandler. There's a connective tissue running through their filmography, it's there in the types of characters that they are most interested and in the way they can build massive amounts of tension from a chain of bad decisions and misfortune, but each work is a building block to create what has ultimately become a very impressive little filmography. Daddy Long Legs is good. Heaven Knows What is better. Good Time and Uncut Gems are tied as their best yet, although both have elements that lose them a couple of points, in my view.

Connie Nikas (Pattinson) embarks on an ill-advised robbery with his intellectually disabled brother, Nick (played by Benny Safdie). Things inevitably don't go too well, leading to Nick being put in prison, and eventually in hospital. Determined to free his brother, Connie comes up with another poor plan. It goes as well as you'd expect. To turn the situation to his advantage, hopefully, Connie starts working with a man named Ray (Buddy Duress) to retrieve a valuable bottle of liquid acid (as in LSD, not the flesh-burning kind) and some stolen money.

Although he has, much like his female co-star, built up an impressive and diverse selection of performances away from the Twilight series, Pattinson does what I think is his very best work here. He's a dangerously dumb guy, taking any small bit of knowledge and figuring out how he can use it to his advantage. Manipulative, weak-willed, and growing increasingly desperate with every wrong turn, he's an unsavoury character who Pattinson manages to keep you rooting for, mainly thanks to his performance and the fact that a lot of his actions are motivated by the need to save his brother. Safdie is equally excellent in his role, a child in a man's body, dangerously unable to change his behaviour even when a threat starts growing around him. Duress is a different energy level, a crook who hopes to make the most of some unexpected good luck, and he helps the film start to gather momentum towards a riveting finale. Jennifer Jason Leigh is wonderful in her small role, a woman that overlooks the worst in Connie because she believes they're both in love with one another, and Taliah Webster excels in her first feature role, playing a young woman named Crystal who ends up helping Connie and Ray.

As well as the spot-on directorial work, Josh Safdie has once again crafted a cracking little script with regular co-writer Ronald Bronstein, but that structure was put in place to allow the actors to improvise their way through numerous scenes. What the film does best is sketch out a kind of criminal underworld that we don't see too often on film. These main characters aren't smooth gangsters or determined professionals. They are people trying to make the most of small, sometimes out-of-the-blue, opportunities. They know enough people connected to others in positions of power, but they will always be very near the bottom of that particular social strata.

There's also another great score by Daniel Lopatin (credited as Oneohtrix Point Never) and the cinematography from Sean Price Williams gives the Safdie brothers the perfect atmosphere throughout their movie. They seem to inspire everyone to have faith in their vision, and that faith hasn't been misplaced yet. It may have taken me too long to get to this one, although I didn't wait when I had the chance to see, and enjoy Uncut Gems, but I'll be trying to prioritise whatever they give us next.

8/10

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Netflix And Chill: Uncut Gems (2019)

Written and directed by the Safdie brothers (Benny and Josh, with Ronald Bronstein once again collaborating with them on the writing of the script), Uncut Gems is another superb film for those who have already warmed to their particular style, a kind of paradoxically slick and polished roam through some grimy environments alongside down-on-their-luck characters the brothers seem to find fascinating. It's also, as I'm sure you're already aware, the best that Adam Sandler has been in years.

Sandler plays a jeweler named Howard Ratner. He's in an unhappy marriage to Dinah (Idina Menzel) that they're close to bringing to an end, he has an apartment that he uses to spend a lot of time with his girlfriend, Julia (Julia Fox), and he owes money to various people, not least Arno (Eric Bogosian), who keeps using some tough guys to hopefully scare Howard into paying up. But Howard knows his time is about to come. He's ordered a stone that contains some valuable uncut gems, he's developing a rapport with Kevin Garnett (played by, well, himself), and he's just one audacious bet away from a big payday. But nobody will really support you waiting for that big payday if you're gambling away all of their money to try and get it. And Howard is certainly happy to bet big.

Uncut Gems is a tough movie to watch. There's no major respite from the tension as events conspire against Howard, whether it be in the shape of a lower-than-expected auction valuation for an item he wants to sell, a number of arguments with an associate named Demany (LaKeith Stanfield) who is also the go-between for Garnett, or his continued attempts to delay paying back money to people who want to physically harm him. Whether it is Howard himself or the camerawork, it feels like a constant bob and weave from one desperate moment to the next, all accompanied by a fantastic score from Daniel Lopatin.

You can choose to like or dislike the movies that the Safdie brothers make, they're definitely happy to stay in a certain wheelhouse at the moment and not everyone will enjoy spending time there, but you can't deny that they bring characters and situations to life with a magic combination of realism and cinematic finesse. They sugar-coat the pill, but only to allow themselves to make the core even more bitter.

Sandler has received a lot of praise for his performance here. It's good. Very good indeed. All I will say, to temper some of the hyperbole that has inevitably appeared in the praise for him, is that his banter and constant need to talk over people, hoping to keep himself in the right by simply repeating whatever point he thinks will help him at a higher volume, is not a million miles away from many of his other performances. It's just that this one is within the context of a drama. I am surprised that I haven't seen more praised aimed at Fox, making her feature acting debut with a pitch-perfect performance, and portraying a character who could easily have unbalanced the tone of the film on a number of different occasions. Menzel does very well here, in a live-action and non-singing role that I hope she does more of in the near future, and both Stanfield and Garnett are good additions to the heart of the film. Keith Williams Richards and Tommy Kominik are believable heavies, Bogosian steals a couple of scenes with the kind of turn that immediately makes you wish he picked more movies to star in, and the few minutes of screentime that Judd Hirsch has helps with that sugar-coating I mentioned.

As a stupid child, I would often raid the tubs of chocolate that we would get in our household for Christmas. My mother would remind me to just have one or two a day, I would always have way more, and I would place the empty wrappers back in the tub as a decoy, somehow thinking that I would use my pocket money to buy a smaller packet and refill the tub. That never happened. My mother eventually opened the tub to have a sweetie, immediately seeing red when she picked up a handful of empty wrappers. The game was up. If you ever tried the same thing then you'll know what I mean when I say that watching Uncut Gems will give you a sensation akin to watching that tub, counting down to the time when you can either refill it or you get busted. If you haven't tried that same thing then just know that Howard is the child who has filled the tub with sweetie wrappers, and the runtime of this movie is spent seeing if he can replenish the container before other people put their hands in.

8/10

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