For the gallery owner at the center of The Gallerist, getting people through the door is going to become a problem once they start looking too closely at the exhibition. Natalie Portman plays a woman whose financial survival depends on impressing the right people, and an accidental death presents her with an appalling solution. There is an audience for everything, apparently, if you can find someone willing to call it art.
Jenna Ortega joins Portman in the dark comedy from Cathy Yan, the filmmaker behind Birds of Prey. The setting trades Harley Quinn’s Gotham for Art Basel Miami, where an invitation, a wealthy buyer, or the right introduction could change someone’s career. Portman’s character needs that break badly enough to gamble on people being more interested in discovering something provocative than asking where it came from.
Roadside Attractions and Vertical have released the official trailer for The Gallerist, which opens in theaters on December 4, 2026. The movie follows an ambitious gallery owner facing mounting financial hardship after a nasty separation. Desperate to establish herself among the elite, she conspires to pass off an accidental corpse as the centerpiece of her debut exhibition. The resulting attention brings influencers and police into an increasingly precarious situation.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Taylor Swift Era Matches Your Personality? 1989 · Reputation · Folklore · Red
Eight specific questions: what is in your notes app, the item of clothing you wear into the ground, what you did the last time you needed a fresh start, the track you skip to first on a new album. Answer them and we will tell you which era you have been living in. Four of the biggest, and four completely different women to be.
🕊️1989(2014)
🐍Reputation(2017)
🧶Folklore(2020)
🍂Red(2012)
01
What did you do the last time you needed a fresh start? Everybody has a move, and everybody repeats it.
02
What is in your notes app right now? Go and look. We will wait.
03
What does your main group chat look like? The one you open first in the morning.
04
What is the item of clothing you wear into the ground? The one that needs replacing and never gets replaced.
05
How do you handle somebody who wronged you? The whole discography rests on this question.
06
Where do you want to be at nine on a Saturday? Pick the one you would choose twice.
07
Which track do you skip to first on a new album? Everybody cheats, and everybody cheats differently.
08
What do you want people to say about you? Eight questions in, this is the one that picks your era.
The Era Is Announced You Belong In…
With The Life of a Showgirl getting an encore edition this week, the era
argument is live all over again. Here is yours, what it says about you, and the case for it being
the best one she has made.
1989 · 2014 · Taylor’s Version 2023
1989
You are the reinvention. 1989 is the record where she walked away
from the thing that made her famous and rebuilt everything from scratch, and it worked so
completely that people forgot there had ever been a risk.
You are at your best when you have decided to become somebody slightly new, and you
commit to it in public.
This is the album that won her a second Album of the Year, making her the first woman
ever to take the award twice.
The era ran on friendship and the city, and you are the one who organises everybody and
then gets photographed doing it.
Your risk is the same as the album’s, which is that the polish can start doing the work
that honesty used to.
Reputation · 2017
Reputation
You are the one who stopped explaining. Reputation arrived after
a year of being written off, with almost no interviews and no attempt to be liked, and it
turned out that saying nothing was the loudest available option.
You go silent when you are hurt, and people mistake that for weakness right up until it
is very clear that it was not.
She released it with no press campaign at all, which had never worked for anybody and
worked enormously here.
The joke about this album is that half of it is armour and the other half is the softest
love songs she had written.
You would rather be underestimated than misunderstood, and you keep receipts on
everybody either way.
Folklore · 2020
Folklore
You are the quiet one who was paying attention the whole time.
Folklore appeared with less than a day of warning, made entirely indoors, and swapped
autobiography for invented characters who somehow felt more personal than the real ones.
You process things by writing them down or turning them into a story, and you would
rather be read than watched.
It won Album of the Year at the 2021 Grammys, her third, and it was made by people who
never shared a room.
The teenage love triangle running across three songs is the most fun anybody had with a
tracklist that decade.
You notice the small thing in a room that everybody else walks past, and you will still
be thinking about it next week.
Red · 2012 · Taylor’s Version 2021
Red
You feel everything at maximum volume and you have never
apologised for it. Red is the messiest album she has made and the one most people love best,
because it is the sound of somebody refusing to be reasonable about how much something hurt.
You hold onto things, you replay them, and you can still describe a conversation from
years ago line by line.
All Too Well became a ten minute song and a short film she directed herself, and it went
to number one anyway.
The whole record is autumn, and you are the person who treats a season like a
personality trait.
Nothing here is cool and that is the point, which is why it has aged better than almost
anything around it.
What Is Natalie Portman and Jenna Ortega’s ‘The Gallerist’ About?
The horrible appeal of the premise is that her scheme requires people to look directly at the evidence and admire it. A successful exhibition means drawing a crowd, generating conversation, and persuading potential buyers that they are witnessing something important. Every part of doing her job well also increases the likelihood that someone will recognize what she has done. For a woman already struggling to maintain appearances, publicity could become considerably worse than obscurity.
That makes the Art Basel setting more than an expensive backdrop, because the story puts financial desperation inside an environment built around exclusivity and perceived value. Portman’s character is trying to secure her place in that world while her personal circumstances threaten to expose how tenuous her position is. Her gamble depends on being able to sell the story around the centerpiece, even as the police threaten to supply a much less flattering interpretation.
The ensemble gives Yan plenty of personalities to bring into that disaster. Alongside Portman and Ortega, The Gallerist stars Sterling K. Brown, Daniel Brühl, Charli XCX, Zach Galifianakis, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Yan wrote the screenplay with James Pedersen, and Portman also produces. The Gallerist premieres in theaters on December 4.
