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 ...

Giant review – Prince Naseem biopic with Pierce Brosnan on hand misses the punch

London film festival
Despite the odd laugh, the story of the boxer’s path from Sheffield gyms to global stardom and his break with mentor Brendan Ingle feels dramatically underweight

There’s a really good cast here, in a movie with a real-life story to tell: how Irish boxing trainer Brendan Ingle mentored a cheeky Sheffield kid from migrant Yemeni parents, “Prince” Naseem Hamed, teaching him to stand up to racist bullies and turning him into a media-friendly world champ in the late 90s, nurturing his showboating arrogance and his lethal fists. But, after becoming wealthy, Hamed brattishly turned against Ingle, cutting him out of the action, and turning him into a combination of John Falstaff and Broadway Danny Rose. Pierce Brosnan plays Ingle; Amir El-Masry is Hamed and Toby Stephens is bullish London promoter Frank Warren who saw the goldmine that Ingle had discovered.

But the movie frankly lacks the Prince’s fancy footwork: the boxing sequences run smoothly but the all-important drama between them is repeatedly flat and one-note. There is no nuance or light and shade in the depiction of Hamed himself, and that otherwise outstanding performer El-Masry isn’t given the chance to show any subtlety or much of what might make his character really interesting – although he’s clearly been training and looks very plausible in the ring.

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