{"id":131203,"date":"2026-01-25T12:24:23","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T12:24:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/131203\/"},"modified":"2026-01-25T12:24:23","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T12:24:23","slug":"natalie-portman-is-about-to-make-a-killing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/131203\/","title":{"rendered":"Natalie Portman Is About to Make a Killing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tHow can you tell if an art show is a success? If a piece sells, the curator typically places a little red dot beside it, letting collectors know that work is no longer available. By the end of director Cathy Yan<\/a>\u2018s facile but fun art-world satire \u201cThe Gallerist<\/a>,\u201d there are little red dots all over Miami\u2019s struggling Polinski Mayer Gallery. In theory, that would be any dealer\u2019s dream, except in this case, they\u2019re mostly concentrated in a puddle of blood beneath a human corpse.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe joke, such as it is, of \u201cThe Gallerist\u201d is that most people wouldn\u2019t know great art if it stabbed them in the heart \u2014 which is precisely what happens to Zach Galifianakis\u2019 insufferable art influencer Dalton Hardberry when he swings by the gallery for an early peek, before the hoi polloi arrive, the week of Art Basel. Polina Polinski (the high-strung title character, whom Natalie Portman<\/a> plays with nearly the same intensity she brought to \u201cBlack Swan\u201d) has been collecting art for years, mostly with her ex-husband\u2019s money. But now that they\u2019re divorced, she sinks her share into transforming a defunct Jiffy Lube into a showcase for uncompromising artists.<\/p>\n

\n\tDalton sees right through her, suggesting that her taste in art doesn\u2019t matter. According to him, Polina\u2019s just a gold-digging dilettante who had fun buying art back when she was married, and doesn\u2019t know the first thing about how to sell work to others. Dalton\u2019s words are cruel and uncalled for, though it feels like a cop-out to have him slip on a patch of water collecting beneath the building\u2019s broken AC, fatally impaling himself on an ultra-sharp, 10-foot emasculator (the same tool veterinarians use to castrate livestock, blown up to Jeff Koons proportions). Wouldn\u2019t murder have made for a more satisfying starting point to Yan\u2019s cynical chamber drama?<\/p>\n

\n\tPolina\u2019s freaked-out assistant Kiki (Jenna Ortega) wants to call the police, but her boss knows that doing so would end her career, so she spins the incident into a publicity opportunity. At this point, \u201cThe Gallerist\u201d feels like something David Mamet might have written (then shoved in a drawer), or else, a fairly obvious follow-up to an earlier Sundance movie, the straight-to-Netflix farce \u201cVelvet Buzzsaw.\u201d But there\u2019s a bigger problem with Yan and co-writer James Pedersen\u2019s script: It\u2019s not like the world isn\u2019t going to notice the sudden disappearance of a social-media D-bag with 2 million followers.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf we\u2019re meant to admire Polina\u2019s capacity to improvise \u2014 which is presumably a sign of both her intelligence and her survival instinct \u2014 then why make everyone else so darn stupid? If anything, the gallerist is the dum-dum here, believing that by surrounding the crime scene with bright orange pylons, no one will examine the sculpture close enough to realize that it\u2019s a real body bleeding out before their eyes.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe intermittently clever movie is full of art-world in-jokes, but seems oblivious to its many plot holes, which are more conspicuous than the slashes in one of Lucio Fontana\u2019s \u201cSpatial Concept\u201d canvases. \u201cThe Gallerist\u201d likely wouldn\u2019t exist if it weren\u2019t for Maurizio Cattelan\u2019s \u201cComedian,\u201d the ripe banana taped to a blank wall at Art Basel in 2019, which later sold for $120,000 (not an unreasonable price, seeing as how it\u2019s become a symbol for the commodification of art). That stunt made a point, whereas the way people respond to a dead body here doesn\u2019t really make sense, beyond setting up a situation in which a handful of independent-minded women manage to think on their feet, turning a fatal accident into an unlikely succ\u00e8s de scandale.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn addition to Polina and Kiki, who keep rushing back into the gallery\u2019s fancy bathroom to refine their plans, there is Kiki\u2019s aunt Marianne (Catherine Zeta-Jones, whose cool-under-pressure energy helps to balance Portman\u2019s slow-motion meltdown), freshly out of prison, and the artist herself, Stella Burgess (Da\u2019Vine Joy Randolph), whom Polina inexplicably convinces not to disown the work, despite its intention shifting completely when Dalton went and speared himself on it. Described as a \u201cshark,\u201d the scene-stealing Marianne thinks she might be able to interest one of her rich buyers in the \u201cultrarealistic\u201d piece, estimating a high-six-figure sales price.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor some reason, Polina keeps claiming that the corpse is made of PVC, which she presumably does to deflect suspicion. But the work is only really provocative if the body is real \u2014 and then \u201cThe Gallerist\u201d might be saying something ethically interesting. By the time Kiki initiates an auction to see how much it\u2019s really \u201cworth,\u201d it\u2019s not clear what the bidders see in it. (One of the easier things to skewer here is how one\u2019s response to art can be so subjective, Polina can spin practically any interpretation to make the sculpture seem legit.) As the turmoil intensifies, Yan\u2019s camerawork gets increasingly agitated, passing through windows and walls, then weaving throughout the space like a drunken hornet.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movie is full of art-world in-jokes, but breezes right past its many plot holes, which are more conspicuous than the slashes in Lucio Fontana\u2019s \u201cSpatial Concept\u201d canvases. Personally, I\u2019ve only once been to Art Basel, and I can distinctly remember the South Florida dude sitting beside me on the flight telling me how much he preferred Los Angeles (from which we were coming) to Miami: \u201cThe people are so much less superficial and shallow there,\u201d he told me, which didn\u2019t quite parse at the time, since those are exactly the words most people use to describe L.A. But then I stepped off the plane and quickly discovered what he meant.<\/p>\n

\n\tMiami is a place where everything seems fake, which presumably explains Portman\u2019s weird Andy Warhol wig (plus the decision to shoot nearly everything in Paris, passing it off as the Florida hot spot). Scaling back after her misbegotten DC movie \u201cBirds of Prey,\u201d visionary \u201cDead Pigs\u201d director Yan has assembled a handful of unconvincing supporting actors to round out the cast, from Daniel Br\u00fchl as a nepo baby with millions to waste on art he might never look at again to Charli xcx as the only person willing to call this emperor naked. Not everyone makes art hoping to get rich, though the movie raises an uncomfortable question: What\u2019s the point, if we don\u2019t buy it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How can you tell if an art show is a success? If a piece sells, the curator typically…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131204,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[64580,123,125,124,64581,64475,64582],"class_list":["post-131203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-cathy-yan","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news","tag-natalie-portman","tag-sundance-film-festival","tag-the-gallerist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}