The Gallerist Review: Cathy Yan's Tepid Satire of the Contemporary Art World Goes For the Lowest Hanging Fruit

2 weeks ago 15

Published Jan 26, 2026, 1:00 PM EST

Gregory Nussen is the Lead Film Critic for Screen Rant. They have previously written for Deadline Hollywood, Slant Magazine, Backstage and Salon. Other bylines: In Review Online, Vague Visages, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Servant, The Harbour Journal, Boing Boing Knock-LA & IfNotNow's Medium. They were the recipient of the 2022 New York Film Critics Circle Graduate Prize in Criticism, and are a proud member of GALECA, the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. They co-host the Great British Baking Podcast. Gregory also has a robust performance career: their most recent solo performance, QFWFQ, was nominated for five awards, winning Best Solo Theatre at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2025.

These days, it's easier to disassociate than ever before, even as social media brings life's horrors right to our eyeballs without so much as a passing thought. Overstimulation breeds inoculation. Part of the calculus behind Cathy Yan's screed against the hypocrisy of the contemporary art scene comes from our collective ability to document the death right in front of us without fully understanding the human cost. It's all well and good to make art that is in conversation with systemic racism, but to actually confront it head on? Absolutely not.

The Gallerist is a tepid satire. Even calling it such feels generous, as the film is almost entirely devoid of genuine humor. It's a mannered film, yet not mannered enough to land as melodrama of the kind Pedro Almodóvar used to excel at, and its attacks on the art world are such low-hanging fruit they're practically touching the ground. The film does precisely what it says on the tin, but that's not a good thing: there's just nothing under the hood, and that one-dimensionality just ends up reinforcing the very thing it purports to criticize.

On some level, that mirroring makes sense. The film is packed with characters whose depth of feeling is only skin-deep. Polina Polinski (Natalie Portman) is an art gallery owner at the site of a former Jiffy Lube, whose business is built on the back of her ex-husband Tom's canned tuna money. Things aren't going well; the gallery's air conditioning unit has broken, and Kiki (Jenna Ortega), Polina's assistant, can't find the money to pay for its repairs. A persistent drip falls onto the linoleum floor, just steps away from a large iron-cast sculpture of a cow emasculator, which is used to castrate a bull.

Polina refuses to put warning cones around the water drip for fear it'll ruin the opening of Stella Burgess's Art Basel Miami show (Da'Vine Joy Randolph). And that immediately poses a problem, because art influencer Dalton Hardberry (Zach Galifianakis) has just shown up for a pre-opening VIP tour, and a subsequent passive-aggressive fight of weakly written barbs leads to him impaling himself on the sculpture, just as a crowd starts filtering in.

In a panic (or a rush of inspiration?), Polina quickly arranges the body to make it look like a purposeful element of the piece. And that's preposterous, obviously, but what's even more incredulous is the idea that no one would even question the veracity of this so-called latex mold of an influencer with two million Instagram followers. The set-up of The Gallerist is so clunky it almost feels insulting to be asked to believe its confluence of events, but it would've worked if Yan and co-writer James Pedersen's script leant into that absurdity with more aplomb.

In fact, the biggest issue with the film is that it isn't nasty enough. It reserves its judgements for the easiest of targets, and doesn't deal with the more enticing questions right in front of them. For one thing, the artist of the show. Burgess is a Black woman whose work is in direct reference to a history of subjugation and slavery, and yet the character is aggressively pushed to the side, and Randolph is given very little to do to bring to life someone who is clearly at a moral crossroads in more ways than one.

The film is more fun once it gets past its opening. Polina figures that she might just be able to use the situation to her advantage and find someone rich enough (and stupid enough) to pay for the art and agree to keep it in a private collection, and thus out of the eyes of the authorities. The ridiculous scheme, which eventually ropes in not just Burgess but art dealer Marianne Gorman (Catherine Zeta-Jones), builds decently well, and Yan has some fun tricks up her sleeve, including Federico Cesca's camera, which seems perpetually perched at a Dutch angle like we're on a sinking ship.

And fun is what it should be, in the end, but it cannot even accomplish that.

But Yan's direction otherwise, particularly of her actors, is roughshod and uneven. No one seems to be in the same film as anyone else. Portman and Ortega are permanently at a fever-pitch of theatrical histrionics. Zeta-Jones is an emotionless statue. Randolph is doing her best, but nothing in the script serves her particularly well. Daniel Brühl, playing a Spanish art buyer with deep pockets and loose morals, is maybe the only actor who is having any fun.

And fun is what it should be, in the end, but it cannot even accomplish that. One gets the feeling that Yan and Pedersen are going for something which skewers the plasticity of a world that claims to give a platform to important, underrepresented voices but can only conceive of doing so through profit, or else they want to criticize a generation of people who are so caught up in social clout they cannot see the crime that is right in front of them. But, neither of these directions are made indelible, and, in the end, The Gallerist is just another piece of art stuck in museum hell, desperate to find a buyer.