SummaryWhen star Parisian auctioneer André (Alex Lutz) learns that a long-lost Egon Schiele painting looted by Nazis is hanging in a small town worker’s home, he pays a visit and verifies its authenticity… as well as its iniquitous wartime provenance. A race to navigate the thorny art world collides with a triangle of players including André’s mendaciou... Read More
Directed By:Pascal Bonitzer
Written By:Pascal Bonitzer, Iliana Lolic
Auction
Metascore
Generally Favorable
75
User score
Generally Favorable
6.5
My Score
Drag or tap to give a rating
Hover and click to give a rating
Not available in your country?
ExpressVPN
Get 3 Extra months free
$6.67/mth
Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable
100% Positive
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
0% Mixed
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Oct 30, 2025
80
Bonitzer evinces an appreciable warmth toward his creations that you feel even from the analytic distance he establishes.
Oct 30, 2025
75
Auction is good, underhanded fun, and even the loose ends that Bonitzer leaves hanging — perhaps this had a longer cut at some point — leave one uncertain about how this high-stakes poker game will play out or who might upend the table with not-quite-all-their-cards on it for that final hand.
Oct 30, 2025
75
Complicated enough to lose a casual viewer but never so convoluted that André and co. are sublimated into the system around them (which would have been fatal for a film so attuned to the relationship between personal interest and collective perception), Bonitzer’s plot spins forward at the speed of an auctioneer’s mouth until raw suspense becomes appropriately inextricable from meaningless gibberish.
Oct 30, 2025
70
Not everything on screen ultimately works here, with certain characters and situations more credible than others. But the director manages to spin a clever modern-day morality tale mixing art, social class and big bucks.
User score
Generally Favorable
50% Positive
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
50% Mixed
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
0% Negative
0 Ratings
0 Ratings
Feb 4, 2026
4
(Mauro Lanari) "Bonitzer works on a line of balance between... on one hand the... moral comedy, on the other a meditation... on the idea of truth" (Francesco Puma). A biopic with the editing of the best French cinema, the abductive approach of early Pialat, but while Pialat knew how to gradually draw us into the story and characters, Bonitzer winds in on himself and, at the end of metacinematic reflections as new as Welles' "F for Fake" (1973), leaves us with a young worker who solves the problems of all the protagonists with the heroic gesture of being satisfied with his own misery. Former "Cahiers du cinéma", screenwriter for Rivette, Téchiné, Ruiz, Akerman, Fontaine, and Verhoeven, he exudes a stench of conservatism. The Bresson of "L'Argent" (1983) is from another planet if only for the humility of having adapted a story by Tolstoy. "Poised between contemptuousness and moralism" (Lorenzo Ciofani), "superficial and vacuous even if masked by a useless elegance and refinement" (Tonino De Pace). 4½
Production Company:
- SBS Productions
- Canal+
- Ciné+
- Cinécap 6
- Cinécap 7
- Cinéventure 8
Release Date:Oct 29, 2025
Duration:1 h 31 m
