Marty Supreme

Harlan Ellison was objectively one of the very best authors of the 20th century. 

He was also, well, he was a lot. I once witnessed him throw a guy out of an autograph line because he wanted Harlan to sign a Babylon 5 poster. Harlan, a creative consultant on the television show, was incensed. 

“Have you read any of my books?” He yelled. The guy didn’t say anything but the battle was already over. 

“I’m not signing that,” Harlan shouted. 

And that was that. Next up was me. I can assure you I told him how much his work meant to me. 

There are a million stories like that. Harlan was rough to people he thought deserved it and he was fiercely loyal to his friends. 

One of those friends, Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho, described Harlan this way: “the only living organism I know whose natural habitat is hot water.” 

Well, in the movies at least, we have found a second organism who naturally lives in hot water. 

Timothee Chalemet’s Marty Mauser, is constantly finding trouble, and when he’s in the midst of the chaos brought on by the first set of problems he’s somehow still looking for more trouble. 

The movie opens with Marty and his girl succeeding in the kind of thing young couples succeed at all the time. Whether they want to or not. 

The movie then, in one of several cheeky moments, lets the audience graphically know that Marty was in fact supreme in that moment.

And from then on Director Josh Safdie along with co-writer Ronald Bronstein put their foot on the pedal and never let the movie run out of gas. 

Safdie directed two features with his brother, Good Time and Uncut Gems before directing this on his own. Their style is this: What if the whole movie was the rapid, paranoid, cocaine fueled final 20 minutes of Goodfellas. 

Good Time is a good movie but it’s too much. Uncut Gems is great but it’s also much closer to a heart attack than it is a dramatic presentation. 

Marty Supreme finds a nice balance, or maybe I had just steeled myself to the Safdie style. 

I’ll tell you what I really loved here. Marty has a girl in his life, actually he has two girls and both of them are married to other guys. He has a type. 

Rachel is brilliantly played by Odessa A’zion. And at one point you realize that Rachel is Marty’s fast talking, scheming equal. She’s his match in all the ways that matter. 

And when that happened I felt safe in this hectic, dangerous movie. My dad once told me he felt better about me once I got married. And it was the same thing for me watching this. Will Marty ever get his life together? Well, he will have to won’t he? Because that girl needs him, and while he won’t admit it he needs her too. 

The rest of this, and there are whole worlds in here, I will leave for you to discover. 

I don’t know if this is the best movie of 2025. But it’s a contender. And it has the best opening and closing scenes in any movie I saw all year.