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 ...

Control review: Kevin Spacey’s sarky GPS wants to kill the Home Secretary for sleeping with the PM

Spacey’s first film since he was cleared for sexual assault makes effective use of his silken voice, but that’s not enough to rescue this wooden and occasionally deranged sci-fi thriller

Kevin Spacey’s redemptive journey of uncancelling steps another millimetre forwards, or sideways, with his somewhat bizarre new role in this low-budget British indie in which, as a disembodied voice, he plays the implacable punisher of other people’s sexual misdemeanours.

It’s actually a decent idea for a single location cat-and-mouse thriller set in a car – similar to, actually maybe better than the idea behind the recent Liam Neeson thriller Retribution. And it was a smart entrepreneurial idea to create a role which Spacey could conveniently record in a studio anywhere in the world. Spacey’s silky, sulky voice saves the film from disaster, just slightly, although there’s nothing he can do about the terribly clunky direction and torpid line-readings from other people.

We are apparently in a future world where tech and AI have made great strides. A besuited man described by other characters as the “British Prime Minister David Addams” gives a speech in a weirdly inexpensive looking function room to a group of people who look as if they have just appeared in The Office Christmas Special. His theme is the overwhelming importance of privacy and afterwards with some bafflingly indiscreet and explicit dialogue makes it very clear to anyone within earshot that he is having a passionate affair with someone described as “the Home Secretary” – whose name is Stella Simmons.

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