Los Angeles, 1998. After her sister dies, Maria Altmann, an eccentric 70-year-old Austrian Jew who survived WWII, discovers a letter that proves her family tried in the 1940s to get back art that had been stolen by the Nazis. Among the pieces was a portrait of her aunt Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt, which was now in a museum in Vienna. Determined to get back this treasure that ties her country and her family into one tormented story, she hires Randy Schoenberg, a young lawyer and family man, to help her…

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Is history thrilling enough to offer cinema good stories? Yes. But does it guarantee a movie will work? Monuments Men by George Clooney disproved that. Also centered on art stolen by the Nazis during WWII, Woman in Gold confirms this. Entertaining but simplistic, touching but superficial, this story full of hope and common sense has a hard time not getting squashed under the weight of classic melodrama, which alternates humor and pathos with lazy skill. Helen Mirren is once again the best thing about the movie, proving, in the wake of his somewhat less mediocre My Week With Marilyn, that director Simon Curtis should really look elsewhere than history books for inspiration.