New movies this week: Timothée Chalamet reigns supreme, family pet horror, Italian comedy and Brazilian thriller

Hello and welcome to this week’s film review wrap – the big movies landing in cinemas this week.

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Marty Supreme
★★★½
(M), 149 minutes

I don’t want to play family therapist, but it must mean something that since the US filmmaking duo known as the Safdie brothers broke up in 2024, both have directed offbeat sports dramas about obsessive egomaniacs who can’t bear to think about coming second.

First off the mark was Benny Safdie with last year’s The Smashing Machine, starring Dwayne Johnson as the mixed martial artist Mark Kerr. But this was calmer than might have been anticipated from the title and subject matter, whereas Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme retains all the itchy energy of past Safdie collaborations like Uncut Gems.

While I never fully trusted Marty Supreme, I never ceased to be entertained by it – which is not a far cry from how many of the characters respond to the motor-mouthed anti-hero Marty Mauser, played by Timothee Chalamet as a study in single-minded youthful ambition to set alongside his previous portraits of Bob Dylan and Willy Wonka.

Scrawny and spectacled, with acne scars and an unflattering skinny moustache, Marty looks like the type who might have sand kicked in his face in a bodybuilding ad. In fact he’s an elite athlete, or considers himself one – but table tennis, his sport of choice, isn’t a guaranteed ticket to fame and fortune in the America of 1952.

With the world championship tantalisingly within reach, he’s forced to keep slaving away in his uncle’s Brooklyn shoe shop. Still, this day job has at least allowed him to hone his gifts as a salesman, which might be where his real genius lies.

Free of self-doubt or anything resembling a moral compass, Marty never stops hustling, whether he’s scamming the patrons of a New Jersey bowling alley or sweet-talking a married movie star twice his age (Gwyneth Paltrow) in the manner of Groucho Marx waggling his eyebrows at the matronly Margaret Dumont.

Marty is loosely based on a real person, the US table tennis champion Martin Reisman, and Darius Khondji’s cinematography adds the patina of sweaty, grimy pseudo-realism that has long been a Safdie signature. But the movie is basically a picaresque dark comedy juiced up with violent slapstick and audacious stunt casting, with Chalamet stunting the hardest of all.

In other words, the identification with Marty is total. Is he a selfish bastard bent on exploiting the goodwill of friends and strangers alike? Absolutely. But while he may be a liar he’s no fraud, and he’s also an archetypal little guy surviving on his wits: the echo of “Mickey Mouse” in “Marty Mauser” can hardly be accidental.

Beyond that, he’s a specifically Jewish underdog pitted against the power of the WASP establishment (inscrutably embodied by the Canadian businessman and reality TV personality Kevin O’Leary, who suggests Kevin Spacey as Harry S. Truman). But whatever sociological themes are signposted from time to time, what really counts is making the big score, triumphing by any means that come to hand, an ethos embraced equally by Marty and the film that bears his name.

It might be objected that for a film about a table tennis player, Marty Supreme doesn’t contain that much table tennis. Still, the set piece matches bring home the aptness of the central metaphor: Marty is quick on his feet, knows all the angles, and when backed into a corner is always prepared to pivot rather than give in.

As a storyteller, Josh Safdie has some of those skills in his own right – and keeping in mind Marty’s knack for playing on people’s emotions when he needs to, it might even be that the outwardly sentimental finale is tougher and more ironic than it looks.

Primate
★★★
(MA), 89 minutes

Unless you’re planning to adopt a chimpanzee as a housemate you’ll be hard put to see a moral in Primate, a domestic horror movie featuring an excess of bloodied body parts in extended close-up.

It is important to say that the film’s star, Ben, the chimp, is not wholly responsible for the carnage. The culprit is a rabid mongoose who tackles him one night and, with one bite, transforms him from an endearing family pet into a rampaging monster with a very bad temper and an insatiable lust for blood.

The film’s British director, Johannes Roberts, a specialist in the genre, has form when it comes to creature features. He’s described this one as his “love letter” to Cujo, the 1983 adaptation of the Stephen King story about a beloved St Bernard who suffers a similar personality change to Ben’s after tangling with a rabid bat.

The film is set on a sprawling house graced with carefully arranged bohemian touches on a Hawaiian clifftop. Significantly, it has no near neighbours but it does have a swimming pool, a fact that becomes even more significant once Ben launches into action.

Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) has just come home from the college for the summer holidays with her best friend Kate (Victoria Wyant) and Kate’s friend Hannah (Jessica Alexander), a party girl who is not to Lucy’s taste. She herself is looking forward to seeing her younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter) and their father Adam (Troy Kotsur from CODA) but he’s about to leave on a book tour promoting his new memoir. They’re all grieving over the death of the girls’ mother, a linguistics professor whose research brought Ben into their lives, so the prevailing mood is dictated by certain tensions.

But there’s no point in dwelling on them. Once the bloodletting begins, tactics are all that matter. Where’s Ben? Where can we hide? Where’s the nearest phone and can we reach it without being spotted? Those are the basic questions and by the time they’ve all been answered the layout of the house and pool deck has become so familiar you feel as if you’ve been there for a lifetime.

Certain things are pre-ordained. The casualty list is organised along fairly predictable lines. As usual, there’s a strong chance that the main characters have been marked down as survivors. Otherwise you just watch for the signs. Impetuous moves are tantamount to death warrants, and the more obnoxious the character, the more gruesome the method of disposal.

Roberts is not about to subvert any of these conventions but he does know how to spin them out without losing his grip on the film’s pace. It’s a wild ride during which you’re not even tempted to wonder if there’s a man in the monkey suit. As it turns out, there is. Roberts decided against using visual effects in post-production in favour of hiring Miguel Torres Umba, an expert in movement, to fill the role. And he’s appropriately terrifying.

FILM
Somebody to Love ★★½
(M) 97 minutes

The quick way to describe Paolo Genovese’s Somebody To Love is that it’s Inside Out for grown-ups – or if you were watching a lot of late-night TV in the 1990s, it’s the Italian version of Herman’s Head.

The plot is straightforward, even compared to what you might expect from a kids’ movie or a half-hour sitcom. Lara (Pilar Fogliati), single in her 30s, has invited Piero (Edoardo Leo), a guy she’s just met, around for dinner – and maybe more, depending on how much of a spark is kindled between them.

Over the course of the evening, there are countless decisions to be made, starting well before the two meet in person. Lara wonders if she should open the door wearing her red Che Guevara T-shirt or something more glamorous. Meanwhile, Piero is asking himself what brand of condom he should bring along, just in case.

The majority of the film is set inside Lara’s apartment, which resembles a cluttered stage set (she works as a restorer of antique furniture). But two further locations are just as crucial: the mind of each main character is represented as a debating society, with different sides of the personality constantly at odds over what the next move should be.

Unlike the creators of Inside Out – or Herman’s Head, for that matter – Genovese doesn’t complicate matters when it comes to gender. When we go inside Piero’s head, we find there are four guys in charge of decision-making, from the passionate, leather-jacketed Eros (Claudio Santamaria) to the wimpy Valium (Rocco Papaleo). Similarly, Lara’s psyche is ruled over by four women, though it’s harder to tell precisely what each of them is meant to represent.

By its nature, this kind of comedy deals in types rather than strongly individualised characters: Piero is supposed to be a philosophy teacher, but if he were a fireman or a zookeeper it wouldn’t make a huge amount of difference. The assumptions about men and women aren’t offensively retrograde – but there aren’t a great many observations that couldn’t have been made in a sitcom or stand-up act from the 1980s, or even earlier.

Technically, too, the film is hit-and-miss: cinematographer Fabrizio Lucci knows how to light a set, but the editing is on the haphazard side, when the material demands an abstract neatness.

All the same, there’s something foolproof about the basic concept: Piero and Lara moving towards some form of connection one awkward step at a time while their inner voices alternately cheer them on, urge caution or squabble among themselves when things go awry.

Much of Somebody To Love could readily be transferred to the stage, where the commentators might be positioned in booths above the main action, like spectators at a sports event. But there are at least a few winning visual gags best suited for the screen, especially when things finally start to heat up for this potential couple. Picturing a mental universe is straightforward enough; the real fun lies in what happens when the mental and the physical start to come together.
Reviewed by Jake Wilson

FILM
The Secret Agent ★★★★
(MA15+) 160 minutes

The Secret Agent is set in the 1970s, when Brazil was in the grip of a military dictatorship, but the only general on view in the film is the one staring down from the many portraits hung in public places.

It’s not the politics of the regime itself that interests writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho. He’s out to present a picture of a world where corruption is the order of the day, an unavoidable hazard which shapes the lives of people throughout the country.

We get a brief but potent summary of this theme in the film’s opening scene as Armando (Wagner Moura) pulls into a petrol station on a deserted stretch of highway and is confronted by the sight of a bloodied, fly-blown corpse lying in the dust. The petrol station attendant tells him not to worry about it. He’s already told the police. They then arrive, only to ignore the corpse in favour of trying to extract a bribe from Armando.

This incident’s wider implications take time to unfold. Mendonça Filho likes to make you work. Exposition is not his style. His screenplay is a jigsaw and the backstory of Armando himself remains a mystery until you have gathered enough clues to piece it together.

He’s a former university professor who was forced out of his job by the machinations of a government-controlled company funding his research. Now his life is threatened and he’s on the run, helped by a resistance group that found him a place in a safe house in the coastal city of Recife. The house is run by Dona Sebastiana (Tania Maria), a gravel-voiced matriarch with a crooked back and a capacious heart who presides over her household of refugees with limitless kindness and great tact.

Mendonça Filho performs such a deft and delicate balancing act between the personal and the political that a large part of the film’s appeal lies in the subplots that unfold as you go about solving each of its puzzles. Dona Sebastiana’s tenants could sustain a movie of their own, while flashbacks to Armando’s marriage, which ended tragically with the death of his wife, shed more light on the evils of the regime.

From the safe house, Armando is trying to secure himself and his young son a new life in a foreign country. But first, he must navigate yet another sub-plot – a pulp fiction concoction peopled by rogue cops and hitmen whose ineptitude doesn’t make them any less dangerous.

There’s plenty of suspense here, but also a strong strain of gallows humour running through the serpentine storyline as if to pay tribute to the benefits of absurdism as a survival strategy, and Mendonça Filho has done a great job evoking the 1970s.

Armando’s father-in-law, Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), is running a cinema exciting its audiences with nightly showings of Jaws. An added frisson comes from the fact that shark attacks are common in Recife – when a human leg is discovered inside the stomach of a shark from a local beach, the public imagination goes to work with bizarre but understandable results.

For the citizens of this regime, fictional horrors are preferable to the everyday ones going on around them because they can be inflated to ridiculous proportions and laughed away.

The film won the Golden Globe for best foreign film at this year’s awards and is now in line for an Oscar, while Maura scored a best actor Globe for his performance – an expertly judged portrayal of a man doing his best in extraordinary circumstances to keep calm and carry on.