2025’s cinema crop can partly be noted for a strong tendency towards genre subversion and perversion. Take, for instance, the salient examples of Sinners, Weapons, One Battle After Another, and Eddington, all of which defy the rules and tropes of genres they pretend to inhabit, and sometimes with a prankster-ish glee.
In line with that attitude, director/co-writer Josh (Uncut Gems) Safdie’s Marty Supreme may be the supreme example of a retooled sports film, upended and gone every which way but loose. On paper and in various ways, the film follows the sports flick formula, but detours and narrative rope-a-dope turns abound along the way. Twists begin with the very sport in question — table tennis — with our feverishly determined hero (or antihero?) Marty Mauser, furtively played by Timothée Chalamet, fighting and bullying his way to the standard climactic game at film’s end.
But by the film's end, our senses have been battered and bruised by the previous two-plus hours of narcissistic overdrive and whiplash plot turns. Some part of us actually would like to see our “hero” lose, and get some retribution for his young life badly lived.