The Christophers

dir: Steven Soderbergh

2026

America’s greatest living director makes another pretty good okayish movie in Britain somewhere. Yay!

Yay?

Extra points to all involved for being British. This flick is already turning up on Best of 2026 lists, even though it’s June 2026, because people love writing up Best of lists so much that they’re now resorting to Best of 2026 so far lists, and, like the loyal trained seal that I am, I click on them anyway.

Perceptive enough to see when clickbait is generated – not perceptive enough to stop clicking on it.

The Christophers is unlike the vast majority of flicks that Soderbergh has ever made, but then his oeuvre of flicks has almost no consistency in terms of actors, technique or theme, except for the Ocean’s ones maybe. And with that in mind maybe it’s not beyond the pale to describe this as a very slow version of one of those heist movies.

Although the pleasure in this is not watching how a heist gets pulled off; it’s solely in watching these characters interact, even though that doesn’t feel entirely accurate. There is dialogue in this film, as in, two actors or more talking with each other, responding to each other. Yet large swathes of the flick involve one person pontificating, monologuing, old mansplaining to his heart’s content.

It helps when the monologuist is played by Sir Ian McKellen. The great Sir Ian McKellen. The strange thing for me about Sir Ian McKellen is that he’s played an old man for so long that to me he’s like someone who’s been ancient for the last 40 years, which doesn’t make logical sense.

If the first flick I saw him in that I remember him from is Gods and Monsters from the 90s, where he played the famous director of the original Frankenstein movies James Whale, as an old lion in decline, how is it that 30 years later he’s playing a similar role now? Was he faking it back then? Being old? It’s hard to fake, you’d think, but nothing is beyond a thespian of his salty calibre, surely?

Maybe these days he finds it helpful to play an old man because… he is an old, old salty dusty man now, or always was, and I guess it’s not like he can play a young man instead(?)

Here he plays a celebrated, if not infamous, British artist perhaps in the style of David Hockney or either one of Gilbert and / or George. I say “perhaps” because I’m not going to pretend I am completely up to date on the contemporary art scene, British or otherwise. And additionally I don’t think Julian is in the place Hockney was just before he died last week, in that Hockney was much beloved, certainly hadn’t been ‘cancelled’, and was still producing works that were selling for squillions.

Oh, and, in terms of David Hockney: Rest in Peace, Mr Hockney – no-one will be able to paint a swimming pool for the next 100 years without being accused of ripping you off.

Julian, in contrast, hasn’t worked in years, has some extant works that have sold for a million or two pounds here or there, but mostly records videos for a hundred pounds a pop on a Cameo—like service for booze and takeaway money. It’s not clear whether he physically can’t create more paintings, has lost his eye or his nerve, or just doesn’t wanna, like a surly child.

Despite being out and proud for decades, at some point he somehow, probably with the aid of lots of drugs, fathered children with two different women that he had no relationship with and doesn’t like. They are adults now, obviously, Sallie and Barnaby (Jessica Gunning and James Corden), and they are depicted as grasping, greedy pieces of shit.

I think the thing I found most confronting about the relationship, the lack thereof, betwixt father and children is just how much he despises them, rather than their supposed avarice. I mean, derr fred they’re avaricious, no question, but I never really grasped why he hated them so much that he wanted them to get absolutely nothing from his estate. Is it that he detests them personally, or that he hates being reminded that he had sex with women 40 or so years ago?

I never found out. That acrimony, though, is the source of the plot. Despite having no talent herself Sallie did get in to a prestigious art school, at which she met a talented artist called Lori (the great Michaela Coel). Years later, Sallie and her dastardly brother Barnaby (only complete arseholes are ever called Barnaby, prove me wrong) want to enlist Lori to work as Julian’s assistant, figure out what’s what in his flat, and complete / secure a bunch of paintings known as The Christophers, a number of unfinished works.

Lori pretends to be taken aback, and clearly enunciates what the siblings are asking of her, which is to forge Julian’s works, and Barnaby gets to say one of the funnier lines (in what is a fairly funny script) “It’s not forg-ing, it’s forging—through”, as if linguistic momentum changes the nature of the offence.

Lori does work at a food truck, though, so there is temptation. I never got the sense that she indulges in being forging-curious for the money, though. Her demeanour at all times seems to be quite controlled, as in, she is impeccably in control at all times, but we get enough hints that there is both a keen intelligence waiting for the right moment to strike, and a seething resentment.

Much later on it’s revealed that Julian publicly humiliated her on a ghastly sounding tv show where professional artists rip shreds off hopeful amateurs, but that shoe never needed to drop for me, along with any other spare pennies. Lori’s justified resentment towards Julian is because he’s a smug, self-centred piece of shit who’s squandered whatever is left of his talent out of fear.

There is a tremendous scene later on, so late in the film that some viewers might have wished for this electric jolt to have occurred a bit earlier in order to give the flick some better pacing, when Lori exhibits her almost supernatural knowledge of the work Julian has previously done on earlier Christophers, down to every brush stroke, paint colour and every absence. She knows Julian’s work better than he does, so naturally it shuts him the fuck up for the first time in the whole flick.

Before that, we, and by “we” I mean Lori, have had to endure days of this bloviating windbag banging on and on about all sorts of bullshit that has nothing to do with anything other than that he’s right about everything and everyone else can go fuck themselves.

If you’ve spent a lot of time with old lions in their winters, it might sound quite familiar. Yet none of it is as a result of anything neurological or dementia-related: Julian is in perfect possession of his faculties, which perhaps makes it all the more irritating.

At least he doesn’t go on about foreigners and migrants.

It’s never clear until the end whether Lori actually intends to go through with the plan, which mutates along the way due to exigent circumstances. It certainly doesn’t help that Julian wants the Christophers destroyed.

He is not blind to what might be going on. Hilariously, his daughter Sallie had nicked one of the Christophers and tried to complete it herself. Quite consciously, I’m sure, it’s rendered here to be reminiscent of the so-called “Monkey Christ” mural Cecilia Giménez restored to the best of her abilities back in 2012 in her Spanish village of Borja. Its revelation to the world remains a day that lives in art infamy.

This flick, blessedly, has nothing to do with the art world itself, whether the creative or the commercial aspect, really. It is about people with talent, but also maybe what they owe the world, what they owe the people around them, what they owe themselves, what they owe the people who they loved who inspired them. Betrayal is a constant theme, one which Julian is happy to keep harping on about, but they’re happy to focus on those who they feel betrayed them, not those they betrayed themselves.

I hesitate to say it’s a fascinating character study because it really isn’t, he’s just an old man yelling at a cloud he painted, but, c’mon, Sir Ian McKellen can do a character like this in his sleep and that doesn’t make it any less delicious to watch and hear.

It is, still, for me, Michaela Coel’s film, as is pretty much any film she’s in. At least two times this year she’s starred in films where art plays an outsized role, but in that other role her rage was far less contained, and her target perhaps more worthy of her anger (I’m talking about Mother Mary, which looked great and had solid performances in it from everyone who wasn’t Anne Hathaway). Here she is far more surgical and precise. She has been wronged just as much, by someone whose careless callousness helped no-one, achieved nothing, was worth nothing, and yet it was still done in an indifferently sadistic manner. For the fuck of it.

And yet she somehow convinces this bloviating geriatric that he did wrong, and should make amends, and he does.

Fascinating. I found the flick fascinating to watch the way these characters dance around each other, working in two completely different registers, as if they’re performing two different dances. The actors are definitely not on the same page energy-wise for 99 per cent of the flick, and yet it somehow works. It doesn’t feel like a meeting of the minds for much of the time, because Julian is just monologuing, and Lori is rolling her eyes and biding her time, waiting for a chance to say anything.

But Michaela Coel has an incredible magnetism to her performances, and her withholding, the stuff she’s unwilling to reveal, the manner in which she rebuffs many of the niceties Julian takes for granted and will not cede, result in revelations in and of themselves. She’s in entire command of her craft, just as McKellen’s character pretends he’s all over the place and yet is still laser focussed.

Her focus isn’t revenge, or recompense, or getting that bag, or justice for herself, but she ultimately does seem to have been striving for some fairness in amidst all the competing needs and egos, and it has nothing to do with her past or the kids’ expectations / demands. Something which I didn’t see coming but appreciated all the same with the ending.

Peak. These are peak performers. This film is tiny in scope, but still somehow great.

8 shout outs to Soderbergh’s long-time cinematographer / collaborator Peter Andrews as well for the excellent camerawork and the fact he works for nil pay out of 10

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“Weinstein ruined the robe for all of us.” – yeah, Julian, that was surely the worst of all his crimes - The Christophers