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 ...

Maria review – Angelina Jolie plays the diva in magnificent stroll around the cult of Callas

Venice film festival
Jolie is a painting to be stared at in Pablo Larraín’s opulent drama, tottering around Paris in the 70s and drawing us in to tragedy as thoroughly as Bellini or Pucchini

Hide the overflowing ashtrays and move that infernal grand piano – Maria Callas, La Diva, is granting a valedictory TV interview. She’s pacing the halls of her Paris apartment, feeding her poodles and strung out on pills. The visiting journalist is called Mandrax, named after her favourite medication. He takes a seat and checks the mic. By way of introduction, he says, “I’d like to walk with you through your life.”

Callas’s life whisked her from the slums of Nazi-occupied Athens to the concert halls of Europe and the US, through a torrid relationship with Aristotle Onassis to collaborations with Pasolini and Zeffirelli. But Pablo Larraín’s opulent Maria shrewdly homes in on the soprano’s final days, showcasing a stiffly dignified Angelina Jolie as the lioness in winter, four years retired and a legend in her own lunchtime. “Make me an appointment with a hairdresser who doesn’t speak,” she orders her doting servants. “Book me a table at a restaurant where the waiters know who I am.” She is in the mood, she adds, for adulation.

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