This review is spoiler-free.
The worst people in your life are going to walk away from Josh Safdie’s 2025 film, Marty Supreme, thinking “literally me,” and I can’t really blame them.
Marty Supreme follows the trials and tribulations of Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a talented table tennis player pursuing greatness at any cost. Chalamet’s sweaty, erratic, and beguiling performance as a part-time shoe salesman, part-time professional table tennis player, part-time hustler, and full-time asshole bouncing around 1952 New York is exhilarating. His character is not only exciting but sympathetic, or at the very least understandable.
Chalamet’s obnoxious charisma easily steals the show as Mauser navigates a post-WWII America that requires unfettered dedication and selfishness to be brilliant, to be at the apex of the emerging hegemonic culture rather than its consumer, Life magazine and all.
The titular Marty Mauser is very loosely based on the charming real-life table tennis champion Marty Reisman. Reisman’s prolific career saw him win five bronze medals at the World Table Tennis Championships between 1948–1952, 22 major table tennis titles from 1946–2002, and most remarkably, the 1997 United States National Hardbat Championship at the age of 67. Reisman is a character and very deserving subject of a documentary from 2014.
The best part of Marty Supreme is that it’s full of energy. An apt sports metaphor is a fast-paced ping pong match, except the players never take a break, and instead run a 100-metre sprint after every rally. The pacing is remarkable, and the characters and settings at Marty’s periphery are full of life.
While Marty’s single-mindedness on table tennis glory prevents the story from diving too deeply into the revolving door of secondary characters, they nonetheless feel immensely fleshed out. This is enhanced by some solid and unique casting decisions, such as Marty’s ping-pong rival Endo Koto, played by real-life deaf Japanese professional table tennis player Kawaguchi Koto, and Marty’s friend and business collaborator Dion Galanis, played by Luke Manley.
Both made their acting debuts in Marty Supreme, with Manley being scouted off a viral street interview where the passionate New York Knicks fan had some choice words for rival Atlanta Hawks guard Trae Young. The effect of this casting is that it renders the film’s world authentic and complexly human.
The most baffling casting gamble that somehow pays off big time is Canada’s very own Sharktank businessman Kevin O’Leary. O’Leary plays Milton Rockwell, a deplorable pen industry tycoon who serves as an antagonistic and strangely paternal presence to Marty.
Maybe he had an easy time playing a scummy oligarch — I would not recommend checking out his closet full of controversies, but my hands go up in recognition of a surprisingly excellent performance full of ruthlessness. In my opinion, he easily outshines his critically acclaimed and far more experienced counterpart, Gwenyth Paltrow — who has a relatively weak showing as a past-their-prime movie star and Rockwell’s wife, Kay Stone — in his feature film debut.
Unfortunately, the movie is bogged down by a somewhat middling ending. It’s not a disaster at all, but the frantic energy of the movie deserved a little more, and it felt as if a thrilling World Cup final somehow ended in a draw. For such a chaotic film, the relatively neat conclusion lacked a punch that should have leaned into — rather than deviated from — its own strengths. Minus points for the corny soundtrack decision as well.
But overall, Marty Supreme is a good movie, and this seems to be the broad consensus. Marty Supreme has garnered nine Oscar nominations and is one of only two independent films to have generated more than $100 million US in the box office in 2025. Objectively, Marty Supreme is a critical and commercial hit, which isn’t that surprising considering the billing of an AAA-list Timothée Chalamet, the backing of the force that is A24, and on top of that, a Safdie brother at the helm.
The more intriguing aspect of Marty Supreme is its position as a sports movie, and what I think is a broader reflection of the state of the genre in the cultural zeitgeist. In terms of the former, Marty Supreme is not a ping pong movie, and maybe even a bad ping pong movie at that. Quite frankly, table tennis could have been replaced with, for example curling, and the narrative would be largely unaffected.
The glorious haze of the indoor smoking era of sport is awesome, and it’s a shame that we only get relatively brief moments in this aesthetic, or actual table tennis overall. While the cinematography is excellent, ping pong is underutilized both visually and thematically in comparison to a movie like Challengers, where it’s instantly obvious why tennis was the sport to tell the story through.
Yet it’s still a really strong sports movie. There are some hallmark tropes to be spotted, from the stoic foreign rival, to overcoming the odds as an underdog vibe, but also substantial subversions to these expectations — instead of a training montage, we get hustles and schemes as a means for Marty’s preparation.
While I can’t give further examples of each to avoid spoilers, it’s fun to keep an eye out for these conventions and to see when Safdie does or does not comply within the genre. Furthermore, the energy of the film is highly kinetic, and the haptic sensations it evokes via sweaty palms, a racing heart, and held breaths are very sporting. The edge-of-the-seat sensation was definitely reminiscent of the drama at a sports game, and the ability to mimic this sensation is one of the film’s biggest draws.
It’s just that the actual sport Marty — and the whole host of characters — is competing in is the American Dream. Capital is the arena, full of villains and underdogs and cheats. Marty has to win because the alternative is to be oppressed by the same material struggles that bog down his friends and family and the people of New York.
The actual games are of unpaid bills, of figuring out where to sleep for the night, of answering to the boss, and of clocking in. It’s through this lens that Marty Supreme takes shape as a sports movie, and the movie’s thematic concerns take full force.
Which leads me into the broader point that I think we may be entering a golden era of sports movies. As politics becomes more sports-like by the day, society becomes further polarized, and every engagement with culture and politics feels adversarial — I defer here for concrete examples to my far more qualified friends in the news and opinion sections — I think there is a desire to see entertainment that contains an apolitical enemy to overcome.
My argument isn’t that sports, or sports movies, aren’t political — pretty much the opposite of that in fact. It’s just that, as an unavoidable realization of deep injustice seeps into every dimension of our lives, it’s natural to crave an arena where (supposedly) only your skill and effort affect outcome.
I recognize that this is an escapist fantasy. But as a narrative tool, sports give storytellers the ability to craft spaces where imposed structures and identities are secondary to talent. It lays a base level of intuitive fairness to build upon. They can also always deviate and tell explicit or subtle political stories from there as well — as is the case with Marty Supreme.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Heated Rivalry has taken Canada by storm, or that A24 has released The Iron Claw, The Smashing Machine, Marty Supreme, and (tangentially sporty) Love Lies Bleeding in such a short span of time. From commercial hits like Challengers and F1, to indie projects like Eephus, there has been a strong slate of some really interesting sports movies in the past few years.
With the commercial success and the actual entertainment quality of Marty Supreme, it’s my bold prediction that we are entering a golden era of sports movies. At least there’s something good coming from the looming recession… after all, Marty struggling to get a job is literally me.
Correction: This article was updated to reflect that Luke Manley was scouted as a passionate New York Knicks fan, not as a New York Mets fan.
