The Christophers: Steven Soderbergh pits Ian McKellen against Michaela Coel for a film rich with ideas about art, criticism and forgery

There’s a certain irony in a film about a stalled artist and his disputed legacy being made by Steven Soderbergh, one of cinema’s most prolific creators. Soderbergh, who once admitted that “a success, to me, is the ability to keep working”, has made at least 37 films, as well as prestige TV. He’s released three features in the UK in the last 14 months alone, busy with what we might term his bold Late Middle period.

By contrast, the subject of his latest film, the elderly and long-inactive bad-boy painter Julian Sklar (a garrulous Ian McKellen) has been creatively barren since the late 1990s, when he abruptly abandoned the third set of his famous portrait series ‘The Christophers’. His legacy will be both art and children – but one has nefarious designs on the other. Broke young London art restorer Lori (Michaela Coel, cool and inscrutable) is reluctantly recruited by Julian’s fail-kids Sallie and Barnaby (blithely grasping Jessica Gunning and James Corden). Greedy for the pickings of Sklar’s estate, they want to install her as Julian’s assistant to secretly ‘complete’ eight very unfinished ‘Christophers’ hidden in his attic so that they can share the hefty sale price after his death. They know Lori has her own grudge against Julian – she can reap revenge and make bank in one fell swoop.

Given Soderbergh’s heist-heavy back catalogue, from Ocean’s Eleven (2001) to No Sudden Move (2021), you might anticipate a Highsmith-style art swindle. But he’s always been a restless director, eager to experiment with form and genre. What unrolls instead is a vivid and quick-witted chamber piece, a (mostly) two-person battle of wills, full of reversals and revelations and sly, art-world-teasing humour.

For Julian is no doddery mark, but a wily, wary adversary who hires the calm, unreadable Lori after a hilariously bloviating and insulting interview. Ed Solomon’s dialogue-dense script then spins Julian’s increasingly unnerving tasks for Lori into a crafty succession of clashes and feints, as they clamber around Julian’s dilapidated London townhouse chasing his whims. These whims revolve around the unfinished ‘Christophers’, the tense focus of the two artists’ brinkmanship from the moment Julian airily orders them to be shredded. Soderbergh (acting as his own cinematographer) films the story’s first meticulous bout of forgery here, with an intense concentration that calls to mind a famous maxim from F for Fake (1973) – that forgery’s act of creation makes it a valid artform. Subsequently threatened with fire, fraudulent authentication and a wholesale makeover, the paintings (real and ‘real’) will be the rope that connects Lori and Sklar in their high-stakes tug of war.

The spectacle – and the heart – of the film is contained within the pair’s engrossing sparring matches, Julian’s grandstanding declarations pinging off Lori’s impassive insights. Rolling repeatedly from spiky to sad, from feuding to fellow-feeling, they create an unabashedly theatrical effect, full of peacocking wit from McKellen (“I was in a ‘throuple’ back when it was merely called infidelity”) and knowing culture-clash comedy. Most satisfyingly, the narrative is also striped with rich ideas about art and criticism, authenticity and legacy, generated by Lori and Julian’s constant friction and their joint status as ‘broken’ artists, unable to access their artistic vision. Julian exploits his waning fame from an old amateur-trashing TV show, Art Fight, by selling caustic Cameo video messages, while forger Lori “squats in others’ creativity”.

There’s a hint of The Dresser (1983) in their irritable exchanges in Julian’s cramped, paint-daubed studio. But when Julian discovers a scathing critical essay that Lori once wrote about him (“Never underestimate the internet prowess of a man who has spent decades googling himself”), Solomon’s dexterous script finds twisty, unexpected outcomes in a string of unlikely alliances and betrayals.

What makes their verbal combat and sometimes complicity feel intense and intimate is the way Soderbergh strips everything down. Embracing simplicity, he puts the camera at the service of these two exceptional performances, using a fluid handheld approach to capture the pair’s emotional back-and-forth. In a stunning scene where Lori gives an acute analysis of the blend of techniques, colours and new love that made the first two series of Christophers sing as paintings, the camera finds every rapt tremor in McKellen’s face, alongside Coel’s deadpan truth-telling. Soderbergh has talked about taking his cue here from cinema’s own Old Master, John Schlesinger, whose Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) pared scenes down to their essence. But among the film’s reflections on an artist reappraising his career, you can also feel a nod towards sex, lies and videotape (1989), Soderbergh returning to the spare template of ‘two people in a room, talking’. 

McKellen’s sparkling performance, an expert and energetic blend of foxy charm and casual cruelty, is what truly sets the film humming. Gloriously self-obsessed, his Julian slides gracefully from acidly witty observations, through self-deprecating asides to defiant self-pity and private fears, a performance as multilayered as Julian’s reworked paintings. You glimpse McKellen’s skill most vividly, though, in the poignant moments where Julian is wounded by his inability to communicate with a bare canvas. His verbose grandstanding contrasts with Coel’s compelling steely stare, sphinx-like stillness and tersely devastating delivery of Lori’s truths, to powerful effect. There’s a delicate theme about performance running through the film – Julian, deprived of painting, has made being ‘Julian Sklar’ into a kind of performance art. Lori, fascinated by “the art of becoming someone else”, is hiding her true self on canvas, and in life. Despite their age-gap, the two actors feel beautifully attuned here – in contrast to Gunning and Corden’s appearances as the squabbling one-note siblings, which push the film periodically into a broader comic register.

For a film about approaching death, and the sudden, devastating loss of talent that may precede it, it’s a surprisingly sparky movie – one that exudes warmth and life, in a way that eluded Soderbergh’s clever but chilly Presence (2024) and the cool, sleek Black Bag (2025). Julian – hands covered in glue, glitter and feathers – becoming momentarily as gleeful as a daubing child in front of a canvas is a masterclass in the joy of creativity. What Picasso said of painting can be equally true of a film: “Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth.”

► The Christophers is in UK cinemas 15 May.