Oscar Season’s Smashing Machine Comes for ‘Marty Supreme’

For the past year, rumors have swirled surrounding the nature of the professional split of Benny and Josh Safdie, brothers and directors who together made defining A24 films of the 2010s, like Good Time and Uncut Gems. They found themselves in an unusual situation for 2025: Each came out with a major, unusually pricey film for the expanding studio that the other was not involved in, toplined by a huge star (Dwayne Johnson in Benny’s The Smashing Machine and Timothée Chalamet in Josh’s Marty Supreme, respectively), and expected to figure prominently into the awards conversation. Their releases were only a few months apart. They spoke carefully and respectfully of moving on from one another in their filmmaking careers.

“Emotionally, it was different — you spend so much time directing with one person — but it felt natural in some ways,” Josh told me in October. A few months before that,…