By Jason Osiason

There is something electric about watching a filmmaker step into a larger arena without abandoning the instincts that made their early work matter. Marty Supreme is the moment Josh Safdie makes that leap. The film carries all the familiar Safdie tension and disaster energy, but there is a new sense of control here, a confidence in the filmmaking that lets the chaos play out without drowning everything around it. It is still messy and loud, but now it has focus.

Marty Mauser is a painfully recognizable figure. Someone who believes in himself with such intensity that the belief becomes the whole point. He wants to prove he matters because he has spent most of his life being treated like the opposite. That is the engine of the film. Not sympathy, not mockery, but a portrait of the way ambition can warp into identity. I understand that. The movie understands that. It never turns him into a punchline. It just watches what happens when ego becomes momentum.

The technical craft is remarkably strong. The cinematography has the Safdie nervous system, but it also has elegance. The camera is not just reacting. It is observing. The production design does real character work, especially in the New York interiors that feel like they are collapsing from the inside. Tournament halls, hotel rooms, subway platforms, they all look like places where people bargain with their future. The shift toward a more mainstream scale works, and I did not expect it to.

The ping pong sequences are genuinely thrilling. They are staged like psychological combat instead of inspirational sports. The absurdity that cuts through them lands because the film treats humiliation and ambition as neighbors. Marty with the Globetrotters and a walrus should break the scene. It does not. The paddle moment should derail the tone. It somehow fits. The movie knows that delusion is not always tragic. Sometimes it is ridiculous, and sometimes it is both at once.

Timothée Chalamet delivers one of his sharpest performances. He does not perform confidence, he clings to it. There is a stubbornness in the portrayal that feels real rather than theatrical. Gwyneth Paltrow is quietly devastating as a faded movie star whose presence carries a whole history with it. She feels like old Hollywood drifting into a Safdie world. There is glamour in her performance, but also fatigue. That balance makes her scenes land.

What lingers most is the ending. Safdie has never been sentimental, but this is the closest he has come to a character touching the edge of hope. Not redemption. Not triumph. Just the idea that collapse is not the only outcome. After a filmography built on free falls, this one pauses and lets the character consider standing up again. That shift matters.

This is a filmmaker growing. This is a character refusing to disappear. This is a movie that understands the cost of believing in yourself, and the cost of stopping.[A-]