Woman in Gold

Maria Altmann, living in Los Angeles, sues the Austrian state to recover Gustav Klimt paintings taken from her family by the Nazis. One of them is the gold-leaf 1907 portrait of her aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer. The case was real and hard. After investigative journalist Hubertus Czernin exposed Nazi-era art theft in 1998, Altmann and lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg went after five Klimts. It reached the US Supreme Court, where Republic of Austria v. Altmann in 2004 established that the paintings had been stolen and that Austria could be sued. An arbitration panel in Vienna ruled in January 2006 that five works should return to the Bloch-Bauer heirs. Ronald Lauder bought the portrait in June 2006 for 135 million dollars, a record price for a painting at the time. It hangs at the Neue Galerie in New York. Helen Mirren plays Altmann and Ryan Reynolds plays Schoenberg. Who it is for: viewers who like legal drama and are interested in art restitution. Who it is not for: anyone wanting formal ambition. The film handles its subject at television scale and the flashbacks stay flat.