10 Movies to Watch If You Loved Marty Supreme

Let’s start things off with the most obvious comparison. Uncut Gems was Benny and Josh Safdie’s last movie together before the sibling directors parted ways, with Benny going off to star in Oppenheimer and direct The Smashing Machine as Josh began work on Marty.

We could, of course, have mentioned any number of the brothers’ movies here (more on Good Time in a second, but Heaven Knows What also comes to mind), but this sports adjacent story of a diamond trader and gambling addict (played unforgettably by Adam Sandler) shares more genetic makeup with Josh’s latest than anything they’d collaborated on before. It’s also, I think, their crowning achievement so far. 

For such an unsung movie in the Martin Scorsese canon, it’s incredible how influential After Hours seems to have been on the current generation of American filmmakers. Maybe it’s nostalgia for a time when New York City was still a place with a few rough edges—or a place you could still get lost in—but whatever the reason, we’re still finding traces of it in movies like Marty Supreme.

After Hours stars Griffin Dunne (An American Werewolf in London) as a Wall Street type who gets a bit out of his comfort zone while chasing a love interest downtown, over the course of one night. With all its late-night bars and back streets, this is an especially good comp if you loved the locations in Marty, as well as Jack Fisk’s incredible production design in the film.

And speaking of recent movies that were inspired by After Hours (not to mention Mikey and Nicky), none have harnessed those influences to more successful ends than Sean Baker’s 2025 Best Picture winner, Anora. 

Starring a phenomenal Mikey Madison, Baker’s movie tells the story of a New York sex worker who ends up marrying the son of a Russian Oligarch, and things only get more interesting and funny when his father’s goons show up to try and pull them apart. If you liked Baker’s earlier movies like Red Rocket and The Florida Project, Anora is, IMO, his best so far.

For all that talk of After Hours, however, no single filmmaker has influenced the Safdies’ style more than Abel Ferrara—and in particular his 1992 movie, Bad Lieutenant, in which Harvey Keitel plays a crooked cop whose gambling addiction has gotten him into trouble with the mob.

This one is especially resonant for Marty Supreme, as Ferrara also appears in the movie— playing the antagonist, Ezra Mishkin—and steals pretty much every scene he’s in. 

In one of the more surprising sequences in Marty Supreme, a Hungarian table tennis star (played by Geza Röhrig) recounts an astonishing story from his time at Auschwitz to Kevin O’Leary’s Milton Rockwell—one that’s made all the more shocking when you learn that it’s apparently based on a real memoir.

For anyone watching who’d seen László Nemes’ 2015 Oscar winner, Son of Saul (in which Röhrig played a man attempting to survive the Nazi death camp), this moment was especially surreal. If you’re curious to see more from the actor, look no further than this astonishing and gripping debut. 

If you loved Marty Supreme and After Hours and are looking for something in a similar vein, Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money, his 1986 follow-up to The Hustler, basically does for late-night pool halls what Marty does for, well, late-night table tennis joints.

The story follows an over-confident pool shark—played by an overconfident Tom Cruise (think Cocktail-era)—who is taken under the wing of a veteran, played by Paul Newman. Reprising his role as Fast Eddie Felson from the original, and still clearly able to sink a few pockets, it’s the performance that belatedly won Newman his first and only Oscar. 

As mentioned above, we could have easily listed every Safdie film to date on this list—but it’s important that we at least make some space for Good Time. This was the brothers’ breakout movie and, with Robert Pattinson, their first time working with an established Hollywood star. 

They’d made nervy movies about hustlers before (notably The Pleasure of Being Robbed), but Good Time was the first Safdie movie to cement their idiosyncratic style. It was also their first collaboration with Oneohtrix Point Never—so if you appreciated his incredible ‘80s-tinged synth score in Marty Supreme, this one is well worth going back for. 

Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash is still one of the great debuts of the 21st Century, and if you like films about vaguely toxic young men whose obsession with “making it” threatens to be their undoing (à la Marty), you’ll likely be into it. 

Whiplash is the story of a wannabe Jazz drummer from a non-musical family who enters into a fascinating, near-co-dependent master-student relationship with his unforgiving teacher—played by a never-better J.K. Simmons.

Released at the end of the 1990s, Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run turned out to be one of the most influential movies of that decade—inspiring everyone from the Wachowskis to David Fincher while creating a blueprint for looping narrative stories like Russian Doll and Edge of Tomorrow.  

Set in Berlin and using the city’s streets and neighbourhoods to wonderful effect, the movie follows Lola through the same half-hour loop, three times—allowing the filmmaker to show how minor changes can lead to drastically different results. 

The last title on our list is 2021’s Boiling Point, a nerve-wracking story presented in real time that feels like what would happen if The Bear and Adolescence had a baby. That latter comp is particularly apt as Boiling Point was made by the same team that went on to create that award-winning show—and also contains a starring performance from the great Stephen Graham.

Taking place over the course of 90 minutes during a particularly stressful night in an upmarket London eatery, the movie stars Graham as the restaurant’s head chef—a man trying desperately to keep it together as the temperature rises.