The Christophers Review: But Is It Art?

Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape is a foundational text of the 1990s indie film movement in America and, though the Oscars lost interest after his Traffic/Erin Brockovich double whammy in 2000, Soderbergh is the figure a lot of critics point to when surveying the crumbling state of American cinema: That guy? Who figured out how to make entertaining movies interesting, and interesting movies entertaining? He’s doing it right.

Now Soderbergh has made back-to-back films in London, and truly – whatever’s in the water over there, it’s working for him. Last year’s Black Bag was a bouncy spy thriller that gifted us a Wife Guy in a turtleneck as the pinnacle of cool. New film The Christophers – another kicky pleasure – mashes up an abortive heist with a rousing palaver about the value and purpose of art. Forty films under his belt, and Soderbergh is still zagging. 

Hollywood screenwriter Ed Solomon (Men in Black, Charlie’s Angels) wrote the original script, to some surprise; the limited setting, the trim cast, the lethal wordplay all suggest he adapted it from a sold-out West End run. That doesn’t mean The Christophers feels stagey – only that it is literate and layered and elicits the kind of electric buzz you get when you’re watching something that’s as invested in ideas as it is plot. 

The film opens with a woman on a park bench, sketching. It is significant that The Christophers is establishing first that this woman, Lori (I May Destroy You creator and star Michaela Coel), is an artist, because shortly she will take a phone call about a job that expands that definition – she is also an art restorer. When she gets off the phone and puts an apron back on, we realize she was actually on her lunch break: The artist is an art restorer is a food truck cashier.

Also, turns out, an exceptional art forger, which is why she gets offered a job by the grasping, mostly estranged children of a onetime bad boy of London’s art world, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen). Old now and increasingly infirm, Julian hasn’t painted anything notable in decades, not since his series of paintings called The Christophers. His kids (played by James Corden and Baby Reindeer breakout Jessica Gunning) know there are unfinished works from the same series that, if finished, would fetch a pretty penny once not-so-dear dad kicks off. Why not hire the down-on-her-luck Lori to befriend Julian, sneak out the paintings, complete them in his style, and plant them back in the attic for a future payday? 

The plan does not go off without a hitch. Much of the fun of The Christophers – and it is very fun – is in anticipating the hitches, then startling when they snag left rather than right. The delight is in watching Coel and McKellen play off each other. She is a marvel of self-possession and microexpression. Listen how her voice pitches slightly higher during her interview, her affect bland and benign but never obsequious; when she drops the façade, it’s like a power surge. He gets the showier part – his Julian is a charmer, a troublemaker, a satyr, a fraud – and at 86, McKellen is all vibrancy. 

The Christophers mostly lives in the now – curlicues of backstory emerge, because they serve a purpose in informing the back-and-forth between Lori and Julian – and that feeling of immediacy is heightened by Soderbergh’s camerawork. (He’s been his own director of photography, as well as editor, on most projects since the early 2000s, under aliases, Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard, named after his parents.) With the action confined largely to Julian’s overstuffed townhouse, the camera sidles up to Lori and Julian like a third housemate, hovering without comment and hoovering up information – her microexpressions, his flamboyant monologuing. Both characters get the opportunity to do what I suspect many artists dream of: confront a critic to their face. I’ll resist the temptation to psychologize Soderbergh or Solomon here – but you shouldn’t. Go see this with somebody who likes to linger in the lobby afterward and chew over a movie. The Christophers delivers a full meal.

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This article appears in April 17 • 2026.