Name: Marty Supreme
Director: Josh Safdie
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Released: 2026-07-01T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 150 min
Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A'zion, Kevin O'Leary, Tyler, the Creator

Marty Mauser wants to be the best in the world at a game most people file somewhere between darts and bar billiards. That ambition, and his refusal to let anyone else set its ceiling, is the entire engine of Marty Supreme. Josh Safdie builds the film around a mid-century New York table-tennis hustler who treats a folding-table sport as the arena where his whole life will be settled, and he treats the smallness of that arena as the point rather than the joke.

Safdie and his co-writer Ronald Bronstein construct the character as a sustained act of will, a man talking, scheming and sprinting past every door that has been closed to him. The screenplay is loosely drawn from the real table-tennis champion Marty Reisman, but it cares less about the historical record than about the texture of relentless wanting. It plays like a monologue stretched to feature length, with each rally standing in for an argument Marty cannot win any other way.

Casting Timothée Chalamet is the film’s central argument about what kind of story this is. He plays Marty as near-continuous motion, a performance built from patter, deflection, physical restlessness and a grin that keeps cashing cheques the rest of him cannot cover. Gwyneth Paltrow appears as a fading screen actress who sees through the act and is drawn to it anyway, giving the film its one relationship between something close to equals. The musician Tyler, the Creator turns up as a hustler-adjacent fixer, and the wider ensemble works less as a roster of names than as a set of surfaces Marty bounces off.

Marty Supreme is the first feature Safdie has directed without his brother Benny, and it clarifies how much of the brothers’ shared signature was already his. The panic-tempo editing is here, so is the handheld closeness and the sense that the camera itself is short of breath. The film belongs to the anxious-protagonist cycle that ran through his earlier work, the jeweller in over his head, the brothers improvising a single catastrophic night, except that here the desperation is aspirational rather than cornered. Marty is not fleeing a debt. He is running toward a trophy almost nobody else believes is worth the chase.

What holds the film together is the writing’s refusal to make Marty likeable in the conventional sense. The dialogue keeps him in perpetual sales mode, and the dramaturgy lives in the gap between the self he is pitching and the one the people around him actually meet. Paltrow’s scenes in particular read as a two-hander about performance, one actor watching another perform, both of them aware of the seams. The table-tennis sequences are choreographed as dialogue by other means, each serve and return a sentence in the running argument about who Marty is allowed to become.

There is a period film buried inside the character study, a portrait of a postwar New York where a back-room sport could still carry real stakes and reputations were made in smoke-filled clubs rather than arenas. Safdie uses that world less for nostalgia than for friction, a milieu small enough that a single match can feel like a verdict on a life. The machinery of a thriller keeps running under the surface, the debts, the marks, the fixers, even as the real suspense stays internal: whether wanting something this badly is a gift or a sickness.

The film is also a test of how much appetite an audience can sit with. Across two and a half hours, it asks viewers to stay invested in a man whose defining trait is that he never stops, and it never fully resolves the tension between biography and invention. Mauser is a fictionalised renaming of a real player, which lets the script sidestep the question of how much of this actually happened. The supporting players pay for that single-mindedness too, and several strong performers register as texture around a portrait that only has eyes for its subject.

Alongside Chalamet and Paltrow, the cast includes Odessa A’zion, Fran Drescher, the filmmaker Abel Ferrara and the businessman Kevin O’Leary. Safdie directs from the screenplay he wrote with Bronstein, his regular editor and writing partner, and A24 produces and distributes. The film runs 150 minutes and is classed as a drama with a thriller’s nervous system, a long sit built around a single restless face.

Marty Supreme reaches Korean cinemas on 1 July, one of the last stops in a global rollout that opened with a Christmas-Day release in the United States and moved through European and Latin American markets in the weeks that followed. It has since become A24’s highest-grossing film, won a Golden Globe and collected an Academy Award nomination, an unusual trajectory for a long, abrasive portrait of a man chasing greatness on a folding table. Korean audiences will be among the last to learn whether Marty gets what he is after.