Critic Reviews

The highlight of the film is the trial. Van Meegeren insists he was not collaborating with the Nazis; he was defrauding them. The film takes some significant, unnecessary, and distracting dramatic license and spends too much time on characters and relationships that are not as signifiant but these scenes are powerful.

While the legal stuff provides the film’s crowd-pleasing element, some of the foundational building blocks give The Last Vermeer a little heft, elevating it to a level where one is almost tempted to call it a quasi-art house production.

Despite the sometimes clumsy exposition, Lyrebird turns out to be an enjoyable melodrama.

This isn’t the kind of storytelling that flatters the audience’s intelligence, and yet, spelling things out ensures that viewers who don’t like to work too hard can follow along easily and focus on the film’s other pleasures — namely, Pearce’s performance and the twisty case of the missing “Vermeer.”

The film moves from detective story to courtroom drama with nicely sketched character studies as a bonus.

The courtroom finale, eating up much of the third act, is a corker. And Pearce holds our focus, still or animated, chewing up a scene or so underplaying it he’s still the center of attention. Like the Great Master he is, he knows how to grab the eye and hold its focus, with or without a menacing mustache.

It’s the film’s exploration of the ethical bartering conducted by van Meegeren — not his expertise as a copyist or his skill as a swindler — that linger after the closing credits.

It’s handsomely filmed, well-acted, and hollower than it wants to be, with a mid-movie revelation that rearranges the moral stakes in ways that dampen the telling.

Not just an enjoyable story to watch but an educational look into hidden history that seeks to show its never a good idea to paint anyone with a broad brush.

There’s no reason why this couldn’t have been good hokey pseudo-historical fun along the lines of, say, The Imitation Game. (Let’s just ignore that some folks perceived that film as Oscar-worthy.) All it required was putting the exceptional character front and center throughout, rather than shrouding his gift in pointlessly vague mystery.