‘The Gallerist’ Review: Natalie Portman Takes Cheap Shots at the Art World in a Schematic, Unfunny Satire

Sundance: Cathy Yan's first feature since "Birds of Prey" is an uninspired misfire where the actors, too enamored with the prospect of working together, forget to let the audience in on their chemistry.

A soul-suckingly schematic satire that takes cheap shots at the art world but is mostly about how many floating camera shots and Dutch angles it can shove into a single movie, Cathy Yan‘s “The Gallerist” is her first feature since the zany 2020 DC entry “Birds of Prey.” That, in turn, was her first feature since her exciting portmanteau of a Shanghai-set epic, “Dead Pigs,” put her on the cinematic map in 2018.

Enter her third film to quibble with the promise of the former two (no matter what you thought of that DC entry, it treated its franchise material with refreshing irreverence), a dire miscalculation as gaudily ill-conceived as a Damien Hirst knockoff.

Starring Natalie Portman as a neurotic, blond-headed gallery owner and Jenna Ortega as the toiling assistant who devotedly cleans up her boss’ messes, “The Gallerist” is one of those movies where the actors are having all the fun, clearly enamored with the chance at working together, while they forget to let the audience in on the entertainment. In not overthinking its clunky conceit and facile observations about art world egos, “The Gallerist” appears to have not thought about it at all.

Polina Polinski (Portman) is readying a showcase of new works by the rising Black artist Stella Burgess (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), and in the film’s opening moments, she keeps reminding her assistant Kiki (Ortega) that “this is a serious gallery” that needs to be taken as such on the eve of the industry-convening Basel art fair in Miami. A tacky art influencer named Dalton Hardberry (Zach Galifianakis) strolls into the gallery to remark upon the work and torment its curator, reminding Polina of the hypocritical chicness of devising an exhibit around a woman of color — a critique of the art world, and how white collectors and curators build themselves up on the backs of diverse artists, the movie never really explores beyond just stating it up top.

Hovering around an exhibit called “Daddy’s Shears,” basically a giant pair of scissors meant to evoke castration, something terrible happens: A leak in the ceiling has collected in a pool on the floor, which Dalton slips on, impaling himself on said shears. What to do with the body? Polina decides to make Dalton’s slowly decaying corpse part of the art itself, hoping to pass it off to potential buyers — including her ex-husband Tom (Sterling K. Brown), whose name is still on the building — as a silicone-based hyper-realistic commentary on male ego and power. In turn, Polina and Kiki could pull off the biggest sale in Art Basel history.

The hijinks that follow — some involving a vamping, ghoulishly face-painted Catherine Zeta-Jones as a haughty art dealer with deep-pocketed clientelle, and styled like drag queen — are all in service of a heist movie framing device that’s deeply implausible and more grindingly ridiculous as further mishaps pile up.

That Polina and Kiki don’t just call the damn cops and relinquish Dalton’s body to the morgue becomes a contrivance that’s impossible to sustain for the film’s already-long-as-it-is 88-minute running time. Each time a new actor enters the frames, including Daniel Brühl as a Eurotrashy trust fund brat who shows up to the gallery with a blank check, you wonder what new ways “The Gallerist” can come up with to squander its usually talented ensemble. Also, enter Charli XCX as Dalton’s trashy girlfriend (???) for a role that barely passes as a cameo, and also suffers a slapstick fate.

Pressing on the movie’s already harshly unappealing aesthetic is a score by Andrew Orkin and Joseph Shirley that feels like “The White Lotus” theme song run through AI. On the spectrum of art world satires defined by bluntness and shiny surfaces to convey the hollowness of their core, “The Gallerist” makes the critically loathed, gallery-greed-skewering “Velvet Buzzsaw” look like Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning “The Square.”

The one moment at which this viewer started to feel a smile forming finds Portman’s character, retconning her gruesome scenario in real time as authorities descend upon the corpse, improvising a “Stop the Violence” live performance that makes its point more sharply than the film’s other 87 minutes: that blanket platitudes are used to feed its arbitrary form social context. Otherwise, “The Gallerist” is just dead-faced viewing at its lowest.

Grade: C-

“The Gallerist” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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