The Burnt Orange Heresy (2019)

Giuseppe Capotondi's The Burnt Orange Heresy is not good. It starts off interestingly enough – drug-addicted art critic who is spending more than he's making (Claes Bang), young woman who clearly isn't telling the truth about who she is (Elizabeth Debicki), daffy old painter (Donald Sutherland, unscrupulous art collector (Mick Jagger) – so there should have been intrigue and perhaps some wisdom and a few thrills. The Burnt Orange Heresy would like to be The Talented Mr. Ripley, with schemes on schemes on schemes and real identities revealed or better yet hidden forever. But this movie was actually just rather boring. The script feels slightly off, stilted, with several real clunkers – especially as delivered by Donald Sutherland. Debicki is interesting enough, and I residually love her from her great performance in the equally stilted crime film Widows, and I like Claes Bang, too. But this movie just kind of sucked. It's not very thrilling or exciting, and Capotondi's gaze is sort of flat. He's interested in "telling the story", and one isn't really sure how to feel about any of what we're watching, as though the director doesn't have an opinion on the film's proceedings at all. There are some surprising moments in the third act, but they came too little too late for me, and then the actual end of the film is almost insistently, intensely boring.