Marty Supreme

MARTY SUPREME   ***

Josh Safdie

2025

IDEA:  In 1952, a cocky young table-tennis player from New York gets into worsening straits on his journey to prove his greatness.

BLURB:  In the vein of the last two films Josh Safdie made with his brother Benny — and the gritty New Hollywood tradition that inspired them — Marty Supreme is a raucous, whirlwind portrait of a monomaniacal schemer who can’t help digging himself into deeper holes as he rushes headlong toward some elusive reward. Working on a broader historical and sociopolitical canvas than he has before, Safdie casts this character as an embodiment of American ideals in toxic overdrive, a hyperbolic national avatar of self-sufficiency, exceptionalism, and ruthless striving. Timothée Chalamet dives into this role with nervy, full-bodied gusto, darting through the film with an indefatigable flop-sweat energy that is equaled at every turn by the breakneck pacing, cacophonous soundtrack, and restless camerawork that captures a teeming ensemble of faces in extreme closeups. Among several subversions of sports-movie conventions, Safdie refuses to make the narcissistic, immoral Marty easy to root for. At the same time, he makes him impossible to despise, and this is why the character is compelling. If Marty signifies an unabashedly swollen American ego, he also represents working-class mettle and Jewish perseverance. An unusual vignette about a Holocaust survivor underlines a crucial theme: for a disadvantaged minority, survival takes on a different form. For Marty, that form is an overcompensating audacity revolving around an embryonic ping-pong ball that entangles him in Oedipal relationships and the dark heart of capitalist ethics. His perdurance is less a triumph of the American can-do spirit than the raw, existential will to keep on going.

Nouvelle Vague

NOUVELLE VAGUE   ***

Richard Linklater

2025

IDEA:  In 1959 Paris, young film critic Jean-Luc Godard decides to make his first feature film.

BLURB:  There are movies about filmmaking that depict the process as a lofty and labor-intensive undertaking, and there are those, such as Nouvelle Vague, in which one of the most seminal works of world cinema is jury-rigged in 20 half-days by a brash young director without a plan wrangling an exasperated cast and crew. Linklater could have glorified the making of Breathless, or dramatized its production as an unmitigated behind-the-scenes shambles, but instead he shows Godard as the kind of restive, inspired, but insouciant dilettante who drifted through his own first film, Slacker. Guillaume Marbeck is a dead ringer for JGL; permanently in his signature sunglasses and dragging on a cigarette, he has the director’s cadences, physicality, tireless intellect, and stubborn arrogance down to a T. Watching him orchestrate his vision, offhandedly and with an impish disdain for convention, one grasps Breathless as a lightning-in-a-bottle product of material contingency and impromptu, reckless invention. Even more than a chronicle of one particular director and film, however, Nouvelle Vague is an immaculate cinephilic recreation of a creatively fertile milieu, where Truffaut, Demy, Varda, Bresson, Melville, Rossellini, and sundry other luminaries brushed shoulders. David Chambille’s vintage lensing looks like it’s right out of the era, and the attention to antiquarian detail extends to the simulated optical subtitles and cue marks. Considering this aesthetic fidelity, it’s surprising Nouvelle Vague doesn’t mimic the radical formalism of Breathless or other New Wave films (not a single jump cut is used). Where the film does pay more direct homage is in the script’s bevy of quotations, which capture not only a distinctly Godardian intertextuality but create a playful, reverential dialogue between creators, from Leonardo to Godard to Linklater himself, who share a certain bug called art.

Hamnet

HAMNET   **

Chloé Zhao

2025

IDEA:  A family tragedy rends the domestic peace of Shakespeare and his wife Agnes, spurring the former to write one of his greatest works.

BLURB:  Hamnet is based on a fundamentally shaky foundation: that the death of Shakespeare’s son directly inspired the creation of the Bard’s play “Hamlet.” This isn’t just speculative and schematic, but, in the hands of O’Farrell and Zhao, a premise that doesn’t translate to particularly compelling or illuminating drama. Worse, it’s ethically dubious, using a child’s death as a plot device for the unlocking of adult creativity and meaning, and as a presumptuous request for the audience’s tears. With leaden solemnity, O’Farrell and Zhao portend the boy’s death long before he’s born, making Hamnet a protracted waiting game. The overall aesthetic follows somber suit, with Łukasz Żal’s ill-fitting digital cinematography casting everything in a muted sheen to match the tonal monotony. Thank goodness for Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, who bring a pulse to Zhao’s airless filmmaking in performances that suggest the humanity of characters largely reduced to symbols of stoic maternal suffering and male-ego creative genius, respectively. Their emotional vulnerability occasionally cuts through and charges the film’s stodgy self-seriousness, whether it’s Buckley’s churning, memorably silent wail of grief or Mescal’s mix of melancholy and pride as he watches his play come to life from behind the stage. Yet their tears and gesticulations alone — nor a finale that strains effortfully for pathos — are enough to stir an audience that’s given insufficient feeling for their (and little Hamnet’s) inner lives.

The Plague

THE PLAGUE   ***1/2

Charlie Polinger

2025

IDEA:  At a water polo summer camp in 2003, a diffident boy becomes both victim and collaborator of his predatory peers. 

BLURB:  A dread-inducing coming-of-age thriller, The Plague makes the case that there’s perhaps no worse period in life than a boy’s early adolescence. It’s not exactly a novel perspective, but it’s one that first-time feature filmmaker Charlie Polinger vividly demonstrates in 90 supremely stressful minutes that should conjure a chilling wave of memories for males in the audience who survived middle school. Although the premise suggests body horror — and there is a fair amount of acned and scabbed skin — the film deemphasizes obvious puberty metaphors to instead locate its terror in the realm of the social. For Polinger, the physical awkwardness of pubescence is nothing compared to the toxic group behavior of a gaggle of preteen boys in a confined space. His superb cast of young actors, tasked with carrying the weight of a film almost entirely absent of adults, creates a pungently realistic homosocial atmosphere of taunting, posturing, and libidinal excess in which a timid boy like Everett Blunck’s Ben can never feel totally safe. Polinger compounds the sense of menace in Kubrickian tracking shots down the empty hallways of the community center and in reverberating sound design that combines underwater ambience with eerie non-diegetic vocalizations. Is The Plague perhaps overdetermined in its frequently logic-defying deluge of kid horrors? Probably, because seriously, where are the adults?? On the other hand, I think back to my own preteen years in school and remember a galling lack of checks on the most vicious of bullies. Polinger’s film doesn’t seek symbolic revenge on them, Carrie-style, but does something more uneasy by figuring adolescence as a sticky morass we just learn to muddle through, with the knowledge — or blind faith — we’ll emerge better on the other side.