The Christophers (2025)
Thirty-seven features into his career, Steven Soderbergh makes films the way a very good plumber lays pipe: efficiently, without visible effort, and to a standard that few directors working today could match. The Christophers is controlled, largely pleasurable, and shot with the offhand precision that has become his signature, though his signature is capable of more than this film asks of it.
Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) is a once-towering figure of the London art world, now a reclusive hoarder of grievances, surviving on the residue of former fame and a tawdry television programme that probably does more damage to his reputation than obscurity ever would. His two estranged children, played with cheerfully mercenary energy by James Corden and Jessica Gunning, enlist Lori (Michaela Coel), a painter and sometime forger, to infiltrate Julian’s home studio under the pretence of being a prospective assistant. Their goal is to access a fabled unfinished series of canvases, complete them by whatever means necessary, and secure an inheritance before the old man’s reputation deflates past the point of commercial usefulness. A sensible plan, as family betrayals go.
The film’s central pleasure is McKellen and Coel, who together generate a sustained electricity that lifts Ed Solomon’s screenplay above what it might achieve with lesser actors. McKellen plays Julian as a man who has confused wit with wisdom for so long he can no longer tell the difference, and Coel brings a watchful intelligence that makes every exchange feel like a negotiation with concealed stakes. When Julian discovers that Lori once wrote a caustic critical essay about his work, the film briefly sharpens into something stranger and more morally serious than its surface comedy has suggested. Soderbergh, shooting in his customary handheld style, keeps the camera close and mobile, alert to the fine gradations of feeling that pass across both faces.
Corden and Gunning, capable performers both, are given thinly written roles that function mainly as plot mechanism, and the script’s wit deserts those scenes almost entirely. A script this preoccupied with questions of authenticity, forgery, and critical value occasionally circles those ideas without committing to them; the film raises the question of what we owe to the creator behind a great work, allows the question to sit long enough to feel serious, then deflects into irony before any of its characters are required to answer it.
There is an appropriate irony in a film about a stalled artist and disputed legacy being made by a filmmaker of Soderbergh’s extraordinary productivity. In my opinion, the more pointed irony is that a film so interested in what happens when artists withhold their best work has withheld a little too much of its own.