Marty Supreme (2025)

Despite its 2:29 length, Jack and I enjoyed this story of an unlikeable young man in 1950s New York with aspirations of fame and fortune as a ping pong player. Timothée Chalamet earned an Oscar nomination as the title character and is supported by a cast of nearly 200, including Odessa A'zion as his love interest and Gwyneth Paltrow as a Broadway star. This article lists some of the many cameos (Isaac Mizrahi, Fran Drescher, Sandra Bernhard), some of whom you may spot and others, perhaps not. 

Josh Safdie makes his debut as a solo director after co-directing six features with his brother Benny. Josh co-wrote the script with their frequent collaborator Ronald Bronstein, loosely basing it on Marty Reisman's 1974 memoir The Money Player: The Confessions of America's Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler.

I'm streaming the original score by Daniel Lopatin on Apple Music, but what I jotted down while watching was that the movie featured a lot of 1980s hits, listed here, despite it being set about thirty years earlier.

Nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Directing, Best Cinematography (Darius Khondji), and Best Production Design (Jack Fisk), it didn't win any. In all, it received 44 wins and 287 other nominations. Imdb lists many interesting trivia items, too.

Chalamet was last blogged for A Complete Unknown, Paltrow for She Said, Safdie, Bronstein, and Lopatin for Uncut Gems, Khondji for Bardo (he also shot Uncut Gems), and Fisk for Killers of the Flower Moon. A'zion has been in fifteen other features and more, but I know her from eight episodes of the 2025 series I Love LA.

We rented it on March 6 and that's still the only way to stream it. Rotten Tomatoes' critics reign supreme with a 93% average while its audiences are following the bouncing ball at 82.