"their success with the Adam Sandler-led gambling thriller and its proximity to professional sports seems to have unlocked the pair's fascination with the thin and often arbitrary line between winning and losing. Their specific fixation on the desperation that can be unleashed by athletic contests (and the delusional idea that an athlete can bend the outcome by sheer force of will) is all over their lopsided pair of 2025 movies, the first features they've made fully apart."
"Marty Mauser seems particularly likely to throw his ping-pong paddle across the room in a rage if he was told that art is not a competition-or even that sports are about pushing yourself to do your best, not pushing others to coronate you as the best. Good as he is at table tennis, Marty might actually be better as a salesman;"
Josh and Benny Safdie each made separate 2025 films focused on athletes and the corrosive hunger to be declared the best. Benny chronicles Ultimate Fighting pioneer Mark Kerr in The Smashing Machine, tracing career highs and lows. Josh fictionalizes table tennis legend Marty Reisman as Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), who markets a branded ball called Marty Supreme and alternates between charm and self-destructive ambition. Both films examine how athletic contests can unleash desperation and the delusional belief that sheer force of will can bend outcomes. Marty operates as a salesman in 1950s Manhattan while manipulating others to pursue victory.
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