The Best Offer

Virgil Oldman has forged a reputation as a premier restorer and auction facet of the art world, a cultivated misfit who keeps people at arm's length. His life runs on ritual, procedure, and a private correspondence with objects rather than friends. Then Claire Ibbetson, a woman of striking beauty and evident fragility, hires him to value and sell her family's treasured collection. The assignment pulls Virgil into a relationship he never expected, and the longer he works to win her trust, the more his cool detachment begins to crack. What starts as professional regard deepens into an intense fixation that unsettles the routines of his quiet existence, forcing him to confront the difference between admiration and obsession in his life.

Released in 2013, The Best Offer is directed by Giuseppe Tornatore from an original screenplay. This production pairs Geoffrey Rush with an international cast in a restrained drama about art collecting, desire, and the fragile balance between control and vulnerability.

Critics praised its patient pace, formal precision, and Rush's restrained central turn. The narrative quietly probes loneliness, the lure of beauty, and how obsession can blur ethical boundaries. Claire Ibbetson remains enigmatic, testing Virgil's boundaries, while Tornatore builds a mood of elegiac longing and guarded vulnerability that lingers after viewing.

Worldwide box office reaches about $19,255,873, on a budget of $13,500,000. The modest gross reflects a specialty release with arthouse appeal rather than broad commercial reach, mirroring the film's measured pace and focus on character over spectacle and moral questions.

Among steady viewers, the film is valued for its precise portrayal of the art market and its reserved mood rather than blockbuster spectacle. It maintains a small but devoted following among Tornatore fans and Geoffrey Rush admirers, who remember Virgil Oldman's careful routines and the film's austere beauty and restraint.