Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Two 2025-minted releases, still out there in theaters.
Marty Supreme
Yesterday this movie was nominated for the inaugural Oscar for Casting, and if there were ever a justification for a somewhat curious category, this movie is it. (Actually the voters did well on this: The other nominees are The Secret Agent—astonishing array of faces and types—Sinners, One Battle After Another, and Hamnet.) In this case, the variety of the people, their authentic period resonance, the odd "Do I know this person from somewhere?" occasioned by at least a half-dozen of the supporting players, all feeds into how Josh Safdie's movie creates its zany momentum. The film keeps you off balance, and part of that is this merry-go-round of people. Who is the dude playing the nemesis of ping-pong-playing anti-hero Marty (Timothee Chalamet), the businessman with a lizard-like focus on rapacious capitalism? It's Kevin O'Leary, known to some (but not to me) from the reality show Shark Tank, an actual business buccaneer-creep. Turns out the guy's a hell of an actor, but then maybe you have to be, in his line.
It even extends to top-lined players such as Gwyneth Paltrow, who has always been good but has been one of those movie stars whose image got so elaborately cartoony offscreen that it became hard to get past on screen. She's reborn here—and gives off a distinctly 1950s aura.
I'm not sure how Safdie and casting director Jennifer Venditti did it, but one of my perpetual bugaboos about period movies is that the people somehow don't look like they could have come from the time period—not because of their haircuts, although that's an easy tell, or their grooming, but because something in faces is distinct to certain era. Marty Supreme, though, puts you right in 1952. (Is this the first time in the thousands of reviews I've written that I've named a casting director? Oscar, you have achieved your goal.)
That madcap immersion is key to Marty Supreme. This movie hurtles through kitchen-sink realism and soaring near-surrealism, and it clicks because you believe in this world—not as reality, but as a fully-imagined movie construct. Chalamet's commitment to the Safdie pace is admirable, the language bristles (Safdie scripted with Ronald Bronstein), and the movie brilliantly picks up momentum at the moment when you think, well, maybe we'll slow down for a bit now. (I refer to the extended sequence after Chalamet's hustler returns from his first overseas engagement.) An incorrigibly engaging movie, although the last five minutes rang hollow to me, and seriously let down the previous excitement. The movie's been so savvy about show business (which is the same as all business) up until that time. "Now they bring the pig on the stage," someone whispers to Marty at a particularly absurd/cringeworthy moment. The movie needs to stay with that caustic thrust.
The Testament of Ann Lee
Here's a film that didn't get any Oscar nominations, although its distributor clearly hoped for something for Amanda Seyfried and perhaps its remarkable music. (The physical production is pretty remarkable, too.) Ann Lee was a founder of the Shakers, both visionary and nut, and Seyfried is possessed enough to bring this preacher to extremely vivid life. The movie's at its best in its musical sequences, which use traditional Shaker songs but make them sound very modern, a soundtrack accompanied by amazing visual waves of writhing and hip-throwing. These sequences are exhilarating, dark and buoyant at the same time, as mad as their leadership. (A sect that discourages its adherents from having a sexual life had better have something else seductive going for it.) Director Mona Fastvold stages the non-musical scenes as somewhat more recognizable period-picture material, but not by much; a lot of what happens is murky and odd.
The film has stayed with me, although this is not the same as saying I enjoyed watching it, which mostly I didn't. We are in immersive fever-dream territory here, and while that seems an appropriate approach for a film about religious belief (or mania, as the case may be), the enigmatic core—and maybe just the dank muck of the visual palette—makes for a difficult experience. I admire the movie's commitment, even if I had a hard time finding a way in.
January 23, 2026
