Supreme Cinema

On Joachim Trier’s 'Sentimental Value' and Josh Safdie’s 'Marty Supreme'

Marty Supreme, 2025

In my brief tenure as critic here, I’ve been pretty clearly pessimistic about the current state of the cinema. Discerning readers will note that the only film I’ve reviewed positively so far was released 50 years ago. They’ll note, too, that I’ve been entirely ambivalent about the overall quality of this past year’s cinematic output. I took the chance in my Superman review to air my exhaustion with the whole superhero genre (a sentiment that at least seems somewhat shared by the general moviegoing public — for now). On the back of Seth Rogen’s The Studio, I waved away any talk about 2025 being a banner year for the return of good cinema, opining that most of the highest-grossing movies every year continue to be films aimed at children. Then I wrote about finding Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein only fitfully interesting; I wrote about Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, and why what passes for adult cinema in the world of small-sized and “independent” films — though far better than the average blockbuster — is still, on the whole, much duller than it ought be.

On the one hand, I think it’s appropriate to opine like so when given the right stage. Ours is an elegiac century, down to its bones. The subject of “serious” arts these days is most often a barely-suppressed, ongoing reckoning with the anxiety unleashed by the last century, and with the weight of all our self-conscious failures to live up to its most sterling achievements in popular culture. To add to this general, mournful air is, to some readers, understandably, the veritable flogging of the dead historical horse—one we’re all quite aware has long since passed away beneath us. Still, on the other hand, to do otherwise would mean telling a lie. And that is the work of artists, not critics.

So as we head into 2026, I owe it to my readers to finally bestow some genuine praise on the best films of 2025. And there were plenty of good movies, though in general I found myself most excited by the ones everybody else seemed ambivalent about. I loved Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly and Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt; found Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon charming and admired Eva Victor’s debut Sorry, Baby. I was surprised by the punk rock digital garishness of Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, which I found thrilling. To the likely dismay of many, I also held fast to my adoration for Wes Anderson — the most unfairly vilified director of this century. The Phoenician Scheme was one of the loveliest and funniest films of his career. I find his films, all of them, to be emotionally overwhelming experiences, and remain perplexed by people who don’t.

I’ve also been confounded by many people’s reactions to Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Those who praised it as a perfect film seemed way too carried away by the hype, while those who think it wasn’t revolutionary enough should get their heads checked — not because of any actual politics in the film (which are hazy because life itself is hazy), but because the idea that a film’s quality has anything to do with revolutionary politics is an insult to the creative freedom of artists everywhere. But this is an old problem, hardly unique to our day and age: people have always distrusted art they suspect of being insufficiently aligned with their own moral programs. After watching the film a second time, I do think it’s extraordinary on its own terms, even if in the long run it’s one of the least-great films from the greatest working American filmmaker. If it wins a dozen Oscars it will be the rare movie that deserves to do so.

But all those titles aside, I suppose I ought to stop putting off my denouement here, and get to the reason I’m writing this: to praise the very best of the year. And I did not see any films in 2025 better than Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value and Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme — two films I feel confident calling future classics. If I’ve delayed getting to them until now, it’s only because I find it difficult to say much about such great cinema, except to repeat that it’s plainly and obviously that: great cinema. The two films could not be more different — one lurid, frenetic, exhausting, and linear; the other still, quiet, melancholic, and filled with light. One set in a past that occurs in a furious present-tense; the other in a present oppressed by the thrum of the past. And yet each is such a stunning work of resolutely contemporary cinema: not just film — not just movies — Cinema. Genuine, grand works of popular entertainment that escaped the Arthouse with all their ideas and techniques intact, sacrificing none of their artistic bona fides as they reach outward to meet their (hopefully sizable) audiences. Both films even work brilliantly as metaphors for the current plight of cinematic artists themselves (though, let’s be real, a large portion of the greatest films have always been about this, directly or indirectly). But I won’t belabor that point too much. I’ll only try to explain what I think makes these films worth seeing on the big screen.

In Sentimental Value, it all starts with a house. Joachim Trier and his longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt begin by introducing us to the old Borg family home. Our two lead characters, sisters Nora and Agnes (Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), grew up there, as did their father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a Bergman-esque film director who left them behind after divorcing their mother. As the plot begins, the mother has just died. Nora has become an acclaimed stage actor suffering from opening-night panic attacks, depressed and haunted by a former suicide attempt; while the younger Agnes, who once acted in one of Gustav’s movies as a child, has settled into presumably happy domestic life as a historian with a loving husband and son. Gustav approaches Nora with a film script, insisting she play a character clearly based on Gustav’s own mother, Karin, who was tortured by the Nazis and later killed herself. Nora gives him an outright no. By chance, Gustav then meets a famous Hollywood actress (Elle Fanning, in a brilliant bit of meta-casting) who is keen to shed her starlet image and prove herself as a serious actor being directed by a serious Scandinavian auteur. She takes the part instead.

All revelations of the Borg’s familial history and difficulties are treated by Vogt and Trier with a characteristically light touch — no sudden discoveries, no pointless suspense for the audience. Their intergenerational tragedies are like the old house itself: lived-in, somewhere they keep returning to despite themselves, because it’s the place that made them who they are. The house is the metaphorical and literal center of the film, and in a dazzling prologue, Vogt and Trier imagine the entire history of the place through the eras. Here, as in their last film, The Worst Person in the World, they turn to the voice of an older, female narrator to speak objectively, literarily, of the thoughts of the characters, and of the history itself.

Throughout the film, this narration comes and goes, and we are treated to more and more images from the past — we see how the rooms of the home were occupied by different generations, we see images from the very different childhoods of Gustav and his daughters. In some sense these moments are the natural evolution of the digressions Vogt and Trier have increasingly employed in their last few films — as when the young Anders in Oslo August 31st imagines following people from a cafe all the way home to observe their lonely lives; or in The Worst Person in the World’s dizzying montages on climate change and the deaths of Julie’s female ancestors. It’s a wonderful way of using film language to accomplish something novelistic, yet in Sentimental Value it feels even more assured, even more important for our grasping the underlying structure of the film, as it spirals out and away from that center into more and more conflict among its characters, and in their ideas of themselves, before returning for an ending that feels somehow both surprising and conclusive.

Besides the extraordinary performances — Skarsgård, Reinsve, and Lilleaas one-up each other continually, and Fanning is stunning in sequences requiring her to perform as a mediocre actor slowly becoming a good one — what I will remember most from the film, for a long time, is its tone and its sense of light. So many of the most beautiful images in the film are soft and warm, as close to natural light as Trier and his cinematographer, Kasper Tuxen, can get. And given the apparently singular spectral of an Oslo summer, this is particularly beautiful. By now Trier is an expert in balancing his use of handheld with more stable shots, unburdened by the need to show off, able to pursue pictorial beauty for its own sake, but always with a true eye to what the point is. He is, in other words, a great director, not just a writer. His visual style is a flawless marriage of arthouse observation, brief flashes of punk immediacy, and occasionally thrilling push-ins and montages that come from a more obviously American pop film tradition — just as the subject and tone of the film runs the gamut from Ibsen to Hollywood to documentary, from high to low. It’s an exquisite creation, one of the few great films in recent years that could only have been made right now, by an artist of this particular temperament, even as it feels simultaneously timeless. It’s a reminder that the newest things often feel the most peculiarly familiar.

Josh Safdie achieves a similar coup in Marty Supreme, only one that points in an obviously opposite direction. Just as with Uncut Gems and Good Times — the last two films he made with Benny (which now feel a bit like single-drill exercises in preparation for the all-out court press of Marty) — the film is a one-way slalom, a relentless scene-to-scene-to-scene development of the same insane and exhausting logic that drives its never-not-hustling lead character. Only a single digression — a brief unforgettable excursus to an overheard tale from Auschwitz — occurs in the course of the film, which is otherwise preoccupied by the nearly picaresque blunders of the indefatigable Marty Mauser, whose big talk and endless hustles are pitched at allegorical proportions. Marty is not only a single, striving, 1950s Jewish boy, with a globe-spanning American dream. Marty is every hustler, every American man, every American Jew, every single hopeful winner of every sports game ever, every midcentury American guy with a business, every entrepreneur who ever sold himself, every artist — and therefore also Timothée Chalamet himself, and Josh Safdie himself, and probably all of us, insofar as the unquenchable fire and thirst of a Marty Mauser still activates the undying itch of the dream America continually inflicts on itself and the world.

That is to say: Marty Supreme, as its swaggering lead actor and its director have frequently told us, is a film of immense ambition, itself about the burdens and follies of ambition. It is Raging Bull and The Hustler and Boogie Nights and any other cocky/tragic American epic of the low road, of the burnt-out hope and faith in the self. Safdie and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, film all kinds of manic activity from far away with long, crashing telephoto lenses — the way Robert Altman used to do. And yet with supervision from the legendary production designer Jack Fisk (the actual genius behind There Will Be Blood and many of Terrence Malick’s greatest films) the film feels so grounded in an actual felt past, no amount of anachronisms can interfere with it. Marty’s tenement building; the seedy hotel featuring Abel Ferrara and his dog; the London Ritz; a Brooklyn shoe store; finally a tennis exhibition in Tokyo — every one of these feels seared into my memory as a real place, a place I’ve been, that is how detailed and true it seemed, on the big screen. It’s a reminder of where big Hollywood budgets actually used to go: to those departments and craftspeople and studio necessities that could render the exact kind of detailed, illusory cinematic world an audience could really lose itself in.

Still, what I remember best of Marty Supreme is its insistent, bleary-eyed, midnight darkness, laced with neon; supercharged montages of con jobs and tournaments; its carousel of a soundtrack that whirls from Daniel Lopatin’s synthesizer landscapes to mid-fifties jukebox numbers to all those anachronistic pumping eighties songs, drawing the film forward into a future of coked-up and sweaty sports films, as if to say, in a different world, the world of the future, Marty would have finally been a champion. Part of Safdie’s brilliance lies in his ability to combine so many disparate elements together — ping-pong, Chalamet’s ego, sports movies, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, the Holocaust — in a way that doesn’t feel incongruous, only grandly life-sized. Same with all the brilliant performances that basically turn stunt casting into an art form itself: Tyler, the Creator as a fellow strutting artist (that is: table tennis hustler); Gwenyth Paltrow as a has-been Hollywood actress; actual capitalist Kevin O’Leary as a vampiric businessman; Son of Saul star (and soon-to-be Malickian Jesus) Géza Röhrig as a concentration camp survivor. Special mention should also be made for the wonderful Odessa A’zion, as the woman doomed to love Marty and nearly die for it.

But of course the center of the film — the reason for the film — what so much of the film is actively meditating on — is Chalamet, an actor who has by now become synonymous not just with preternatural talent as an actor, but with an obsessive actorly will. Chalamet’s story of himself, what he sells us as an actor, is the idea of abolishing all doubt and all cringe in the reaching for unironic greatness, doing so with the total faith that willpower and discipline alone are enough to accomplish it. Of course, the catch — as with many an American story — is that this fucking works. The Sell is too zealous to be denied. He is what he says he is, just as Marty Mauser is what he says he is: a phenom, a new era, an unstoppable dreamer and king of himself.

Chalamet as cultural figure (and as great actor) is a gift to a writer-director like Safdie, whose career thus far has been one long obsession with abolishing the difference between “realism” and “real life,” from having Arielle Holmes reenact her own drug memoirs in Heaven Knows What, to structuring Uncut Gems around an actual Celtics game and casting Kevin Garnett as himself. As Safdie prepared to blow his intimately-detailed street-level “reality” up to classic Hollywood levels of historical sweep and symbol, he surely looked around and realized there’s no better moment, no better young actor, and no better climate for this narrative than right now, with Chalamet. And just as with his inverse performance as Dylan in A Complete Unknown, part of the role is a commentary by Chalamet on Chalamet, on the impossibly high status of American movie acting post-Brando, on the ambitious icon he’s embodying, and on American iconicity itself.

However, the final and most important power of the film comes from its acknowledgment of a world itself far stranger, and more tragic, than we (or Marty) can imagine. Marty is not a dreamer because he succeeds, and he doesn’t succeed because he dreams. He survives because he has the will to do so, and in America the individual dream is synonymous with survival. As another fusion of pop cinema with the conceptual tools of the arthouse, only working it out the other way around, Marty Supreme takes an opposite tack to Sentimental Value, ending not with wandering individuals returned to a warm family center, but to the curse of familial normalcy in the wake of a failed individualism. Its sense of lingering tragedy is no less profound — though it does at least hold out some slight hope for redemption, somewhere, in the acceptance of the impossibility of achieving certain of our dreams. Like all great art, it refuses to say anything more definitive beyond that. But it gives us one hell of a great entertainment to get us there.

Sam Jennings, The Metropolitan Review’s film critic, is an American writer living in London. He is an Associate Editor at The Hinternet, and he runs his own Substack, Vita Contemplativa. For those interested, his Letterboxd account can be found here.