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

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.

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.

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 Moura 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.