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.

A Rainy Day in New York (2019)

Yes, we know: Woody Allen has been canceled (see below*). But we can still appreciate the art despite how we feel about the artist. And we enjoyed this rom-com in which Timothée Chalamet plays the Woody role of an eccentric, pessimistic, yet romantic New Yorker with bad posture, Elle Fanning a naive, cornfed blonde, and Selena Gomez a beautiful, snarky sidekick. The star-studded cast boasts Liev Schreiber, Annaleigh Ashford, Jude Law (with a terrific New York accent), Cherry Jones, Diego Luna, and more.

Perhaps liking a Woody Allen directed and written movie is one of my guilty pleasures. They're sort of old-shoe comfortable, going back to my youth. I expect snappy dialogue, beautiful photography, classic jazz tunes whose titles reflect the scenes into which they are placed, and gorgeous sets and wardrobe representing the upper crust of Manhattan, and I get them nearly every time. Speaking of upper crust, Chalamet's character's name is Gatsby, for goodness' sake.

As noted, there are many delightful tunes to hear during the movie. Here's a list of the songs. Though not credited, Chalamet sings Everything Happens to Me, with Conal Fowkes sitting in on the piano. No original score, as usual. Vittorio Storaro is behind the camera and Santo Loquasto heads the production design team.

Allen and Storaro were last blogged for Wonder Wheel, Chalamet for Dune, Fanning for Teen Spirit (in between we loved her in 30 episodes of The Great), Gomez for Spring Breakers (she's worked a lot since then, notably in 30 episodes of Only Murders in the Building), Schreiber for Isle of Dogs, Ashford for Bad Education, Law for The Grand Budapest Hotel, Jones for The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Luna for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and Loquasto for Allen's Café Society.

*In 2017 in my post on Wonder Wheel I wrote a long paragraph about Allen's literal trials and tribulations. This movie began shooting that year but Amazon, which was financing it, halted the production because of the accusations against him. He sued, settled, and completed the movie, and it was distributed in other countries to much success. It was released here in late 2020.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics, at 47% and its audiences at 56, have dampened enthusiasm. Sure, it's not his best work. But we're not sorry we saw it with our subscription to Amazon Prime (also available with a subscription to Peacock) in late October.

Dune (2021)

This sci-fi saga of a young man called upon to travel to a sandy planet to protect his people is visually spectacular and has many fans, including the Academy, but I agree with Jack, who said that he could see the technical nominations but not Best Picture. This is part one and part two is slated for next year.

Timothée Chalamet, a proven talent, heads up the cast of dozens, not one of whom got an acting nomination. Some of the other talents are Oscar Isaac, Jason Momoa, Josh Brolin, Zendaya, and Charlotte Rampling.

Director Denis Villeneuve works from a script that he co-wrote with Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, based on the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert. It's a testament to the failure of multi-tasking that I read the book during college classes and don't remember much of either.

Hans Zimmer's Oscar-winning score can be streamed on Apple Music and elsewhere. It's very good and features some newly invented instruments as well as vocals by Lisa Gerrard. The movie also won for cinematography (Greig Fraser), production design (Patrice Vermette), editing (Joe Walker), and sound and visual effects (big teams), with nominations for makeup and hair, costumes, adapted screenplay, and best picture.

Chalamet was last blogged for The French Dispatch, Isaac for The Card Counter, Brolin for Deadpool 2, Zendaya for Spider-Man: Far from Home, Rampling for The Sense of an Ending, Villeneuve for Blade Runner 2049, Spaihts for Passengers, Roth for A Star Is Born, Zimmer for Wonder Woman 1984, Gerrard for Samsara, and Fraser for Vice.

I'm not sure if I've seen any of Momoa's work, other than that cringey gag at the Oscars Sunday when Regina Hall patted down him and Brolin. (That's all I'm going to say here about the show.) I have seen plenty of Vermette's, including The Young Victoria, for which he was Oscar-nominated, Vice, Sicario, and Arrival (the latter two directed by Villeneuve and edited by Walker). Walker was Oscar-nominated for 12 Years a Slave.

Fans should read the multitude of trivia items.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics have not deserted this movie, averaging 83%, while its audiences are even sunnier at 90. We streamed it on HBO Max on March 10.

The French Dispatch (2021)

Well suited for our family's Christmas movie, this madcap "love letter to journalists" from auteur Wes Anderson fleshes out four stories and an obituary that appear in a New Yorker-type magazine, and we loved it. Its full title is The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun.

The cast of over 250 features, among others, Benicio del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, and Bill Murray in the disparate segments, many of which take place in a fictional town called Ennui-sur-Blasé, which translates to boredom on apathy. There are too many puns and Easter eggs to list. Just be alert, especially if you know any French.

Anderson directed and wrote the script with story help from Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness, and Jason Schwartzman. This is Anderson's tenth feature and I'm glad to have seen them all.

I'm streaming the jaunty score by Alexandre Desplat on Apple Music as I type, and you can also get it free on Spotify. Here's also a list of songs.

Director of Photography Robert Yeoman aptly mixes black and white with glorious color in the various segments, framed with creativity, and I must mention the terrific production design team, led by Adam Stockhausen.

Anderson, Coppola, and Schwartzman were last blogged for Isle of Dogs, del Toro for Sicario, Brody for Third Person, Swinton for The Personal History of David Copperfield, Seydoux for The Lobster, McDormand for Nomadland, Chalamet for Little Women, Murray for On the Rocks, Desplat for The Midnight Sky, Yeoman for Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang, and Stockhausen for Bridge of Spies. And, though I didn't mention it in the blog, Guinness co-wrote the story for The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics and audiences are rather blasé, averaging 74 and 76%, respectively. We heartily disagree.

On December 25 we rented it from iTunes and I, for one, was glad to have the pause button to look at the magazine covers displayed with the end credits. And, just for statistics' sake, this is the 16th movie in 17 years that Jack, Amy, and I have watched together on Christmas day (COVID kept us apart last year but at least this year we were able to isolate together!).

Little Women (2019)

Amy, Jack, and I loved this adaptation of the classic novel, with its focus on empowered women, decorated with magnificent photography and luscious costumes and set design. Though a tad too long at 2:15, the performances and visuals make up for the excessive length.

Saorise Ronan is made for the lead as Jo March, the most forthright of the four sisters in the Civil War era. Apparently Ronan told, without actually asking, director Greta Gerwig she was going to play the part. Emma Watson plays her older sister Meg, Eliza Scanlen younger sister Beth, Florence Pugh is youngest sister Amy, Laura Dern their mother Marmee, Timothée Chalamet their besotted neighbor Laurie, Chris Cooper Laurie's grandfather, Meryl Streep is the girls' Aunt March, and Tracy Letts the editor Mr. Dashwood, among others.

The cinematography is thanks to Yorick Le Saux, the costumes are by Jacqueline Durran, and production design is by Jess Gonchor.

This year's #OscarsSoMale shut director/screenwriter Greta Gerwig out of a directing nomination (Oscars and elsewhere) but she did get one for the script, as well as the producers' nomination for Best Picture (it won't win), Ronan and Pugh for acting, Durran for costume design, and Alexandre Desplat for the score, which can be streamed on Spotify, Apple Music, and more.

Ronan was last blogged for Mary Queen of Scots, Watson for Beauty and the Beast, Dern for Wilson, Chalamet for Beautiful Boy, Cooper for It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Streep for The Laundromat, Letts for Ford v Ferrari, Gerwig for Lady Bird (which also starred Ronan), Le Saux for Non-Fiction, Durran for Anna Karenina (it won her the Oscar, and she was also nominated for Mr. Turner, Darkest Hour, and Beauty and the Beast), Gonchor for Hail, Caesar!, and Desplat for Isle of Dogs.

Full disclosure: getting over a cold on Christmas day, I had a coughing fit and left the room, missing a good ten minutes towards the end. I'd like to see those ten minutes sometime. This was the fifteenth year in a row Amy, Jack, and I have watched a movie together on Christmas day. Pro tip: always get your Christmas day movie tickets in advance.

PBS has complied a list of the almost two dozen adaptations of Louisa May Alcott's two-part novel. This is a good one, not only according to us, but also to 95% of Rotten Tomatoes' critics and 92% of its audiences. See it on a big screen if at all possible.

Beautiful Boy (2018)

Not for the faint of heart, this story of a meth addict's effect on his family is based on memoirs by the addict and his father. Jack and I liked it. Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet are terrific (last blogged for Too Funny to Fail: The Life & Death of The Dana Carvey Show and Call Me by Your Name, respectively) as the father David Sheff and son Nic Sheff, especially the latter, going through all the mood swings of drug use. Maura Tierney (some of her best work was in White Sands (1992), 97 episodes of NewsRadio (1995-99), 189 of ER (1999-2009), Scotland, Pa. (2001), nine episodes of Rescue Me (2009-11), and seven of The Good Wife (2012-13)--I haven't watched any of her 43 of The Affair) and Amy Ryan (most recently in these pages for Bridge of Spies) are in the background as David's second wife Karen and first wife Vicki. Coincidentally, Tierney was in one episode of The Office with Carell, and Ryan was in 17 earlier ones, with her character Holly dating Carell's Michael in many of them.

Director/co-writer Felix van Groeningen did the same on the moving The Broken Circle Breakdown though I failed to say so in the blog. Van Groeningen and Luke Davies (Davies adapted the book that became Lion) adapted David Sheff's Beautiful Boy and Nic Sheff's Tweak, both published in 2008.

Trivia: the crazed drawings of Nic's in the movie were actually drawn by Jasper Sheff, David and Karen's now 24 year old son, whose birth and young life are depicted in the movie.

The title comes from the John Lennon tune of the same name, written for his second son, Sean Ono Lennon. I can't help but remember that his firstborn, Julian Lennon, got little, if anything.

There's no composer on this movie. I counted about thirty songs in the credits when we saw it Friday. Fourteen are on this spotify playlist and 25 on the imdb list, including Sunrise, Sunset from Fiddler on the Roof, sung by Perry Como.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics are lukewarm on this, averaging 69%, and, apparently, not enough viewers have weighed in to give an audience average. Instead, 95% of viewers who voted clicked "want to see." You should probably see it too.

Call Me by Your Name (2017)

Here's another movie we loved: a languidly paced and lushly produced story of a 17 year old boy's sexual awakening with his father's older male research assistant, shot in north-central Italy, between Milan and Parma, and taking place in 1983.

Timothée Chalamet (timo-TAY shall-a-MAY, covered in Lady Bird, where he said to Lady Bird, "You're gonna have so much unspecial sex in your life.") exquisitely gives all of Elio's fine-tuned emotions, up to and including a long, long take at the end where he stares near the camera. The actor can play piano and guitar and it looks like he's doing his own playing. More on that in a moment. Both Chalamet and his co-star Armie Hammer (last blogged for Nocturnal Animals), who plays Oliver, are so gorgeous it's a bonus that they're as good as they are. Michael Stuhlbarg (after I wrote about him in Arrival he was in The Shape of Water and The Post, not to mention 8 episodes of Fargo season 3) is Elio's father and Oliver's boss, projecting warmth and humor.

Director Luca Guadagnino (most recently in these pages for A Bigger Splash) mixes his native Italian with English and French, all subtitled so non-tri-linguists won't miss anything (I hate it when someone has decided that dialogue in a foreign language is so incidental that they leave out the subtitles)--Elio's mother is French and the locals are Italian. The acclaimed 2007 novel of the same name by André Aciman was adapted by James Ivory (best known as the Oscar-nominated director of A Room with a View (1985), Howards End (1992), and The Remains of the Day (1993), he has written only a few screenplays, including The Guru (1969), Maurice (1987), and Le Divorce (2003)). Imdb also claims that the director is uncredited for work on the screenplay. I have no opinion on that.

One reviewer said that the leading roles could have been played by, as I recall, mailboxes, and he would still have loved it. That's a credit to the glorious locations and magnificent cinematography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (he shot Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) which I've been meaning to see since its nominations and awards back then).

Most of the filmmakers are earning nominations and awards, some of which are on my list. Chalamet, winner of a few already, is up for a Screen Actors Guild, or SAG, Male Lead Actor award, to be awarded and broadcast tomorrow night, Sunday the 21st.

Like Guadagnino's previous works, there is no composer. Instead we have songs, ranging from classical to Italian and British pop of the time to two new Sufjan Stevens tracks, all on this youtube compilation and named in full here. Apparently Chalamet didn't do his own playing. I was startled to hear a piano number with excerpts of the one classical piece I played the most as a child and can still sort of muddle through slowly, Muzio Clementi's Sonatina in C Major, op. 36 no. 1 (here it is played fast by a professional). Turns out Erik Satie wrote the Sonatine Bureaucratique as a spoof of Clementi's sonatina.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics and audiences, averaging 96 and 88% (with the latter up by one just since yesterday) are with us on this one.

Lady Bird (2017)

Jack and I loved this tale of a rebellious Sacramento Catholic-high-school senior bickering with her mother and figuring out her life. Saoirse (SEER-sha) Ronan is transcendent as Christine "Lady Bird" and we don't doubt for a minute that she's 17 or 18 (it begins in September 2002), though she's now 23 and, in her Oscar-nominated performance in Brooklyn she played 23 and older as time passed. As Lady Bird's mother Marion, Laurie Metcalf (best known for 221 episodes of Roseanne as Roseanne's sister, she's done a ton of work on screens both small and big) is also getting some awards buzz and the scenes between them go from funny to wrenching. Tracy Letts (last blogged for The Lovers) is the befuddled father/husband caught in the middle. 

Many of the supporting actors are terrific, including high school classmates Beanie Feldstein (new to me, she is Jonah Hill's sister) as Julie, Lucas Hedges (Oscar-nominated for Manchester by the Sea) as Lucas, and Timothée Chalamet (I've seen him in four episodes of Royal Pains, eight of Homeland, movies Men, Women & Children and Interstellar, and he's got another coming out momentarily) as Kyle. The lovely Kathryn Newton doesn't have many lines but, even in those tight blond braids, I recognize her from 36 episodes of Gary Unmarried, seven of Big Little Lies, ten of Halt and Catch Fire, and the movie Bad Teacher, and I mention her because of another movie I'll write about after this.

Greta Gerwig, making her debut as the sole director of a feature (she wrote Frances Ha and co-directed another feature which I missed), has admitted that this movie is semi-autobiographical. Her mother's name is Christine but I hope they were a bit nicer to each other when Greta was in high school.

The lilting folk-inflected score is thanks to Jon Brion (composed for Wilson) and 27 minutes of it can be streamed from this link. The pop songs include Alanis Morissette's Hand in My Pocket, Dave Matthews Band’s Crash into Me, Justin Timberlake’s Cry Me a River, and The Crossroads by Bone Thugs N Harmony.

You don't need our recommendation to run and see this: Rotten Tomatoes' critics' average is a perfect 100% and its audiences a respectable 89.