BEG, BORROW AND STEAL (MARTY SUPREME & ANEMONE)

 

MARTY SUPREME

Sometimes the casting of a movie can tell you a lot about the film and the people who made it - even the smallest of roles.

That's certainly the case with 'Marty Supreme,' the second feature that Josh Safdie has directed without his brother Benny.

Safdie's film has two bits of striking casting.

The first is Canadian businessman, 'Shark Tank' contributor and ardent Donald Trump supporter, Kevin O'Leary.

Playing a successful businessman, O'Leary's casting tells you Safdie's movie is particularly fascinated by the mindset of entrepreneurs.

However perhaps a more significant piece of casting is in a fringe role.

Abel Ferrara, the director of controversial thrillers like 'Driller Killer,' 'Ms 45' and 'Bad Lieutenant' plays an ageing gangster.

We'll come back to the significance of his involvement in the film.

Let's focus on the plot first.

Loosely based on the life of the flamboyant American table tennis player Marty Reisman, 'Marty Supreme' is a typically intense drama from Safdie and his fellow screenwriter, Ronald Bronstein.

Timothee Chalamet stars as Marty Mauser, an arrogant but talented table tennis whizz from Manhattan's Lower East Side who is determined to reach the pinnacle of his sport, no matter what obstacle is put in his way.

At the start of the film, Marty is working in a shoe shop owned by his uncle, Larry Sloman's Murray who is so impressed by his sales patter that he offers him the chance to manage it.

Marty, however, isn't interested and is intent on making the plane to London to compete against the world's best at the British Open table tennis championships.

While Murray and Marty's mum, Fran Drescher's Rebecca treat his devotion to his sport as a distraction from a promising career in retail, he focuses on ping pong while also conducting an affair with his childhood friend, Odessa A'zion's Rachel who is married to Emory Cohen's surly neighbour, Ira Mizler.

Early on in the film, Marty takes a lengthy lunch break to pitch his idea of creating and marketing orange ping pong balls instead of white ones to enable players to wear white to a childhood friend, Luke Manley's Dion Galanis and his businessman father, John Catsimatidis' Christopher.

Later he returns to the shop only to discover his uncle has gone home.

Angered by Murray's failure to stump up the cash he promised for the flight to London, Marty grabs a revolver his uncle keeps and holds his fellow shoe shop assistant, Ralph Colucci's Lloyd at gunpoint, getting him to hand over the amount he was promised fron the safe in the store.

Arriving in London, he's appalled by the accommodation the players are given and after protesting to Pico Iyer's indifferent international table tennis association chief Ram Sethi, he checks into a suite in the Ritz Hotel on his own initiative.

Catching the eye of the English media with his flamboyant style of play, Marty makes it to the semi finals where he is due to face Geza Rohrig's champion Bela Kletzki, a Holocaust survivor.

Holding court with the English media in the dining room of the Ritz ahead of his showdown Kletzki, Marty has his attention drawn to another guest, Gwyneth Paltrow's former Hollywood actress Kay Stone who is accompanying her industrialist husband, Kevin O'Leary's successful ink pen manufacturer Milton Rockwell.

Deciding he will seduce her, Marty pesters Kay by ringing her suite and inviting her to attend hus semi-final as his guest which she does.

After defeating Kletzki who is impressed by his showmanship, Marty has dinner with his opponent in the Ritz and tries to further impress Kay by offering to pay for her and her husband's table when he spots them.

This brings him onto the radar of Rockwell who is suspicious of Marty's motives but is sufficiently charmed by his sense of bravado that he attends the final of the championship where the brash New Yorker is facing Koto Kawaguchi's deaf Japanese player Koto Endo who plays with a unique table tennis paddle.

Badly beaten by Endo, Marty turns the Japanese player into a post-Second World War hero in his homeland and a symbol of his nation's revival.

This prompts Rockwell to make an offer to Marty while he tours Europe with Kletzki after the British championships, earning money performing trick shots as a half time act for the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team.

If Marty take the bait, however,he will have compromise his own professional integrity and bury his ego while enabling Rockwell to gain a foothold for his company in the Asian market.

But will he succumb?

'Marty Supreme' is the kind of film we have become accustomed to from Josh Safdie and his brother, Benny.

It's a relentlessly stressful and extremely tense watch, with a dislikable character at its heart just like Adam Sandler's Howard Ratner in 'Uncut Gems'.

Chalamet's anti hero is a cocky soul who lies, cheats, begs, borrows and steals his way through the majority of the film, with little regard for those around him.

While he is undoubtedly talented as a table player and is blessed with a street cunning, he treats the women in his life appallingly while maintaining a singular focus on getting to the top of his sport by hook or by crook.

Everyone Marty encounters is a means to an end. The vast majority of his interactions are transactional.

And this is why the casting of Ferrara as a mobster who Marty encounters during an accident in a sleaxy Manhattan hotel is so significant.

By casting Ferrara, Safdie is paying his dues to a director whose most celebrated work 'Bad Lieutenant' is clearly the template he and his brother have been following fif many years.

Long before the Safdies' 'Good Time' and 'Uncut Gems,' Ferrara delivered an unbearably tense film with a dislikeable anti-hero at its core struggling to keep his neck above water.

However, unlike Ferrara's gruelling but tightly plotted 1992 indie classic, 'Marty Supreme' is occasionally flabby in parts and a bit too on the nose to be truly lived.

It's not that it's a bad film.

In fact, it has moments of real panache.

It's just it feels from time to time certain sequences overstay their welcome.

A sequence where Marty and Rachel try to recover from a New Jersey farm  the scraggy dog Ferrara's Ezra Mishkin has entrusted him with is overcooked.

The same is true in an earlier sequence where Marty flees the cops after Murray sets them on him during a visit to his mum's apartment.

Another scene where Rockwell humiliates Marty at a party isn't just an uncomfortable watch but unnecessarily excessive and over the top.

Chalamet attacks the role of Marty with gusto, although you can't help feeling that it's a performance purely motivated by awards season glory.

And if the Critics Choice Awards and Golden Globes are anything to go by, that desire is being rewarded.

Paltrow delivers exactly the sort of performance you'd expect as the ageing, unhappy marquee actress, while O'Leary is well suited to the role of the odious Rockwell.

Cohen, Drescher, Ferrara, Sloman, Manley, Colucci, Kawaguchi and Catsimatidis are sparky in the supporting roles.

Sandra Bernhard turns up as a neighbour of Marty's mother, while David Mamet appears as a theatre director working with Kay and Fred Hechinger plays a young actor in the Broadway play she stars in.

Tyler Okonwa acquits himself very well as a taxi driver and table tennis playing friend called Wally who Marty engages to hustle a group of young men at a New Jersey bowling alley.

While 'Son of Saul' star Geza Rohrig' is okay, his casting as a Holocaust survivor turned table tennis champion feels just a little on the nose.

  

Arguably the most authentic performance in the movie comes from A'zion as Marty's resourceful  childhood friend and lover, Rachel.

However it is a role where she and other women play second fiddle to volatile macho characters who strut around the screen.

Vibrantly shot by the Iranian French cinematographer Darius Khondji, the film looks superb with some very flashy Scorsese-sque sweeping camera moves.

But is 'Marty Supreme' a film we will still be talking about in a year's time?

Only if Chalamet gets his way and wins the Best Actor Oscar for a film that is only slightly above average.

('Marty Supreme' was released on UK and Irish cinemas on December 26, 2025)

ANEMONE

For 40 years, Daniel Day Lewis has blazed a trail for many actors of his generation and subsequent generations with a variety of intense screen performances.

Now after an eight year hiatus where he fuelled rumours of a retirement from acting, the Anglo Irish screen star is back in a film he scripted with his son Ronan who also directs.

'Anemone' is a - what else? - intense psychological drama about a brother's attempt to coax his hermit sibling back into family life.

Set in Yorkshire, Sean Bean is Jem Stoker, a former soldier, who ventures into a forest at the behest of his wife, Samantha Morton's Nessa to locate his brother, Daniel Day Lewis' Ray.

Both want Ray to return to Sheffield to help Nessa's son, Samuel Bottom let's Brian who has been sent home by the Army for savagely wounding a colleague.

Ray, however, is a bitter man haunted by his experiences in the care system and as a British soldier who served in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

It takes a huge effort by Jem to pierce his emotional armour and even then, he has to listen to a lot of grievance and invective.

As the brothers engage, past secrets about the family, about their upbringing, about Jem's relationship with Nessa and the Troubles are unearthed.

But can Jem persuade Ray to help Brian get his life back on track?

'Anemone' is an ambitious movie about prickly Yorkshiremen struggling with post traumatic stress disorder.

Effectively a showcase for Ronan Day Lewis' visual flair and his father's acting pyrotechnics, 'Anemone' is nevertheless a grim and frustrating watch.

Like a lot of movies these days, it promises much and looks fabulous, thanks to Ben Fordesman's lush cinematography.

However at a running time of over two hours, it could do with being trimmed down by about 30-40 minutes.

While Daniel Day Lewis remains a magnetic screen presence and Bean and Mortimer are great foils for his talent, you still never really feel he or we get under the skin of his character.

There's also some real self indulgent moments in the film, like when he launches into a monologue about an encounter with a paedophile priest that is so over the top, it just doesn't convince.

And that's something we have rarely accused Daniel Day Lewis of?

While it is good to see the three time Oscar winner back onscreen, this film sits towards the bottom of an otherwise impressive league.

Here's hoping, though, that he gets to sink his teeth into more convincing roles as he heads towards his seventies.

('Anemone' was released on UK and Irish cinemas on November 7, 2025)