Josh Safdie
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Uncut Gems (2019)
Directed by Benny Safdie
influenced by Marty Supreme (2025), The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2008)
Themes Visuals
Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme fuses the relentless intensity of Uncut Gems with the Kafkaesque absurdity of After Hours…
Marty is so stylistically and thematically in line with 2019’s Gems, it’s shocking this isn’t the duo’s official follow-up to that film.
…it’s tempting to compare its structure and many detours to those of Uncut Gems, as both films feature much of the same crew and operate as humiliating character studies…
Josh seems to have retained a bit more of the Uncut Gems/Good Time feel with his latest, Marty Supreme.
Marty Supreme's overall comedic screwball tone and filmmaking remind me of Uncut Gems; it feels like a greatest hits down to its opening sequence being the "business in the front" to Uncut's "party in the back."
Where Uncut Gems is claustrophobic and punishing, Marty Supreme has a laxity and strange warmth beneath the noise.
Unlike films like “Rocky” and “Invincible,” Marty’s passion doesn’t lift others up but often brings them down.
…people will watch a Rocky-esque movie like theirs…
This is ultimately satisfying like how The Karate Kid or Rocky is satisfying, just in a deeper way.
Like the original Rocky, Mauser doesn’t quite get what he hopes for, but gets to go out in a blaze of glory…
…he's crafted a grand, upturned fairy tale that feels like funhouse reflection inverse of Rocky. Where Rocky's defeat was a spiritual victory, Marty's victory feels like a spiritual defeat…
Safdie has basically taken the broader Rocky/Karate Kid formula of “someone fighting against the odds and their own personal demons to give their best, scrappy shot at their given sport”…
Anora (2024)
Directed by Sean Baker
influenced Marty Supreme (2025)
and Josh Safdie by name
Visuals Themes
On Safdie, rather than any one film
Con un aire también al cine de los hermanos Safdie…
Similar modes of madness resonate from the recent films of the Safdie brothers…
There’s an almost Safdie-esque jangling energy to the film…
…a rowdy Safdie-style movie…
…redolent of the Safdies and Scorsese…
On the films
Taking a page from last year’s Best Picture winner, Anora, which stopped its steady passage of time for a combative “one wild night” escapade…
The Smashing Machine (2025)
Directed by Benny Safdie
influenced Marty Supreme (2025), Lenny Cooke (2013)
Themes Plot
Even after splitting up to direct their own films, the duo is still detailing the anxiogenic stories of dreamers, with Benny Safdie making “The Smashing Machine” and Josh Safdie making “Marty Supreme.”
…sticking with the sporting world of Lenny Cooke and Uncut Gems…
It’s not unlike the empty feeling you’re left with at the conclusion of his brother Benny’s recent “The Smashing Machine,” a similar tale of an obscure, troubled sports figure more popular in Japan than at home.
Josh's Marty Supreme, arriving imminently, looks like every other conventional biopic ever…
And some authentic, like the eponymous subject of 2013’s “Lenny Cooke.”
…with brother Benny releasing the Dwayne Johnson sports drama The Smashing Machine in October…
Stylistically, it recalls the coked-out energy of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours…
But above all, it feels like After Hours for the way things go wrong for our protagonist in the most outrageously hilarious and unexpected ways.
Good Time (2017)
Directed by Benny Safdie
influenced by Marty Supreme (2025), The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2008)
Themes Visuals
…their particular type of dreamers are also con-men, liars, and schemers…but ultimately “Heaven Knows What,” “Good Time,” and “Uncut Gems” all revolve around people who dream of a bigger and better life for themselves.
Marty Supreme is the third film in an unofficial Safdie trilogy of thrilling, propulsive character studies of grubby, egotistical, narcissistic New Yorkers, along with Good Time and Uncut Gems…
Josh seems to have retained a bit more of the Uncut Gems/Good Time feel with his latest, Marty Supreme.
If you took any enjoyment from the layers of Good Time and Uncut Gems…
It’s not exactly the neon-lit splendour of Good Time…
It also lacks the subversive fun of the Safdie brothers’ two greatest triumphs, “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems.”
Like “Marty Supreme” (2025), the Holocaust becomes the backstory of the film.
Marty Supreme of course plays the third note in this oddly overlapping cinematic chord this past year, though the relentless Safdie pitch would certainly shatter Niki’s eardrums…
Tuner’s New York City backdrop and “white guy trying to make ends meet” premise is strongly reminiscent of Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, though the central romance and Roher’s sense of snappy fervor rather fall in line with Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, minus the overt genre elements.
A grand tale of aspiration and consequences, à la “Boogie Nights” and “Goodfellas,” it’s one of the year’s best films.
…or Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights…
Safdie takes a page from Raging Bull and is more intimately focused on making this a layered, scrutinising character study.
Sure, but only in the way that Scorsese’s Raging Bull or The Color Of Money are sports movies.
…complete with a Look Who’s Talking!-style opening credits sequence—impregnating his married paramour…
…sequence lifted from Look Who’s Talking, of all places…
Safdie didn’t look much beyond “Shark Tank” when he cast Kevin “Mr. Wonderful” O’Leary, who lends his smarmy reality show energy to the film.
The casting might have been intentional, since O’Leary already plays a scummy, wealthy man in real life on Shark Tank and Fox News.
Kevin O’Leary-the real life billionaire and star of Shark Tank…
Kevin O’Leary, who is just playing his Shark Tank character on the big screen.
Casting O’Leary, known for his appearances on the reality competition series Shark Tank as Mr. Wonderful, is a clever (albeit controversial) choice that plays directly on the audience’s relationship with the television personality…
That’s right, Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank.
…when one places the music side by side with Tangerine Dream’s contribution to Risky Business, they sound incredibly similar.
This is ultimately satisfying like how The Karate Kid or Rocky is satisfying, just in a deeper way.
Safdie has basically taken the broader Rocky/Karate Kid formula of “someone fighting against the odds and their own personal demons to give their best, scrappy shot at their given sport”…
Not since Forrest Gump has so much talent been assembled in service of a story about a guy who excels at a game most of us only have experience playing drunkenly as teenagers in our friend’s basement.
…the film fictionalizes his life into something that occasionally feels like a distant cousin of Forrest Gump. It’s been a while since a movie sent its protagonist ricocheting through this many strange corners of history and ego.
The film has echoes of The Aviator because it’s a period piece inspired by a real person who becomes involved with a Hollywood actress and whose life spirals out of control.
Chalamet indulges Marty’s rough edges and vanities with the glee DiCaprio similarly displayed when he finally shook off coming-of-age parts to play one of Hollywood’s most storied bastards in The Aviator.
Last year’s The Brutalist explored a similar dynamic, with the key variation here being that Marty is an opportunist, not an intellectual.
The relationship between a wealthy industrialist and an exciting, younger talent, hesitant to work with them but in need of their backing, is a core tenet of stories about the American Dream (The Brutalist, just last year)…
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, The Testament of Ann Lee, Blue Moon, The Smashing Machine, Marty Supreme, Hamnet, and more are at the front of said queue…
…in an Oscar season surprisingly rife with offbeat sports biopics (The Smashing Machine, Marty Supreme, each by one of the Safdie brothers)…
Those parlors might remind some of the shady pool halls seen in Paul Newman’s classic THE HUSTLER, but such ping pong halls really did exist in the neighborhood where the really Marty grew up.
A grand tale of aspiration and consequences, à la “Boogie Nights” and “Goodfellas,” it’s one of the year’s best films.
Unlike films like “Rocky” and “Invincible,” Marty’s passion doesn’t lift others up but often brings them down.