Marty Supreme review – Timothée Chalamet a smash in spectacular screwball ping-pong nightmare

Following every dizzying spin of Chalamet’s table tennis hustler, Josh Safdie’s whip-crack comedy serves sensational shots – and a smart return by Gwyneth Paltrow This new film from Josh Safdie has the fanatical energy of a 149-minute ping pong rally carried out by a single player running round and round the table. It’s a marathon sprint of gonzo calamities and uproar, a sociopath-screwball nightmare like something by Mel Brooks – only in place of gags, there are detonations of bad taste, cinephile allusions, alpha cameos, frantic deal-making, racism and antisemitism, sentimental yearning and erotic adventures. It’s a farcical race against time where no one needs to eat or sleep. Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a spindly motormouth with the glasses of an intellectual, the moustache of a movie star and the physique of a tiny cartoon character (though that could just be the initials). He’s loosely inspired by Marty “The Needle” Reisman, a real-life US table tennis champ from the ...

Who was Muriel Box, Britain’s most prolific female film director?

She was also the first woman to win an Oscar for best original screenplay. Now a new radio documentary aims to give her pioneering work a fresh appraisal

In 1991, as a film student, I was offered £50 by a German women’s collective to shoot Muriel Box. But when the documentary director and I arrived at her home we were told that she was too ill to see us. She died a few months later aged 85. While I regret never meeting her, I’m also relieved. How terrible to have shown even a glimpse of my full ignorance of her achievements, a pioneering film-maker who had fought her way through an industry hostile to women to make a major contribution to cinema.

Box directed 13 feature films in the 1950s and early 60s and remains Britain’s most prolific female director. Her titles, made for a mainstream audience, include The Passionate Stranger, an imaginative retort to the romance novel, which boldly experiments with form; the controversial juvenile courtroom drama Too Young to Love; and Box’s favourite, The Truth About Women, an eclectic tapestry of the complex lives of women.

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