Dear Haters of 'Marty Supreme'...

Cannonball with Wesley Morris

The New York Times

News, News Commentary, Arts, Society & Culture

4.7 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2026

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

“Marty Supreme” is a box office and critical hit. The film just received nominations in many of the most coveted Oscar categories — best picture, director and actor. And Wesley is glad about all of it. He loved the movie and its shameless protagonist, Marty Mauser. But it turns out that a lot of people going to see this movie don’t share his feelings. In fact, a lot of them hate it. And much of that seems to have to do with a hatred of Marty himself. Wesley’s friend and a culture editor at The New York Times Magazine, Sasha Weiss, thinks people may be missing the point. Which, to her, has a lot to do with the Jewishness of the film. She joins Wesley to talk it out.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Wesley Morris and this is Cannonball today.
0:05.0	We like some Marte.
0:09.0	Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, we like some Marte. Marty! Marty Supreme.
0:24.1	It's a hit.
0:28.8	It's a hit at the box office and the critics like it.
0:34.2	And so do the people who give out the Oscars because they just gave it a lot of the big ones,
0:36.4	including nominations, by the way.
0:40.4	Best Picture, Best Director, that's for Josh Safty,
0:45.0	and Best Actor for Timothy Shalamey, aka Marty Supreme.
0:49.8	I'm all for this, the movie, and Marty.
0:54.1	They, you know, vaulted right over my expectations for what I want from a movie.
0:56.7	I just had a really good time at this thing.
0:59.5	And the plot is pretty straightforward.
1:02.4	It's about an ambitious Jewish kid slash ping pong champ.
1:05.3	That's not really that.
1:06.4	That's ambitious.
1:11.2	He's in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1952, just a few years after the Holocaust.
1:16.6	But listen, over the last few weeks, it's become pretty clear that a lot of people watching this movie do not feel the way I feel about it.
1:19.9	They really do not like this movie.
1:22.6	They hate it.
1:23.9	Just look at the comments that people are leaving Omanola Darkus' review of this movie
1:29.1	for the New York Times.
	...

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