Danny Moynihan’s 2000 novel Boogie Woogie was set in the New York art world, but it makes a smooth transition here to contemporary London. Indeed, the post-YBA UK scene of celebrity enfants terribles, manufactured controversies and billionaire Russian collectors arguably provides an even more fitting backdrop for this tangled tale of dealmaking and heartbreaking behind gallery walls. Art Spindle – played with wolfish relish by our 2008 Michael Powell jury president Danny Huston – is a rapacious dealer obsessed with acquiring one of Mondrian’s final Boogie Woogie paintings. The work is owned by elderly collector Alfred Rhinegold (Christopher Lee), who has no mind to sell – although his wife Alfreda (Joanna Lumley) is keenly aware of the difference that the £28 million price tag could make to the couple’s declining years. Rhinegold is the film’s sole bastion of integrity: a stickler for owning art because you love it. Tellingly, though, he’s on his way out – and the younger generations possess no such scruples. Hyper-prolific collector Bob Maccelstone (Stellan Skarsgård) amasses art as if it’s stocks and shares, while his languid trophy wife Jean (Gillian Anderson) is more interested in staking her sexual claim on handsome young artists like Joe (Jack Huston). Among the artists themselves, things are no more respectable: most depraved of all is up-and-coming video artist Elaine (Jaime Winstone), whose numerous sexual conquests also provide the raw material for her autobiographical work. Boogie Woogie makes highly enjoyable use of its big, star-laden cast, which comprises eye-popping juxtapositions (whoever thought that lads’ mag pinup Gemma Atkinson would wind up in the same film as theatre heavyweight Simon McBurney?), very stylish bit-part players (such as Charlotte Rampling) and the odd knowing nod to a performer’s past (including Heather Graham’s rollerskating breakthrough in Boogie Nights, the porn industry equivalent of this film and its future near neighbour in movie reference tomes). It’s safe to assume that director Duncan Ward knows whereof he speaks. An experienced director of art-themed documentaries, he is also married to the highly respected curator Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst. Perhaps it’s not surprising, therefore, that Boogie Woogie doesn’t attack the point or value of contemporary art, nor the sky-high prices it commands. Instead, it uses the art world the way Robert Altman’s The Player used Hollywood: not as the source of human corruption, but as an environment that provides particularly favourable conditions for its growth and survival.