Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The art caper is a rich sub-genre of the crime film, populated by some clever and inventive movies. Customarily, they’ve focused on the complexity of a heist; think of Topkapi, Gambit, or Oceans Twelve. More recent ones – The Best Offer, The Burnt Orange Heresy, and The Mastermind – have delved fastidiously into the mentalities of the thieves or fraudsters, and in particular their perverse but rarely inauthentic relationships to beauty. Now there’s one in that vein from Steven Soderbergh, who also directed Oceans Twelve. The Christophers is slick and penetrating as well as deeply satirical, as his films usually are. Crucially, it features a precision-guided Ian McKellen in a role so well-tailored to his native gravitas and playfulness that he probably would have taken it on gratis.
McKellen’s Julian Sklar is an aging art star, now out of fashion and misanthropically bitter, reduced to recording cameos for fans. His grasping adult children, fearing disinheritance, are determined to cash in on his fame. They hire Lori Butler – a talented but disaffected painter who makes a living restoring art and selling sandwiches out of a truck – to serve as his assistant and surreptitiously finish the long-abandoned last of three sets of paintings depicting his former lover – The Christophers – the first two of which were acclaimed. The two repellently venal kids plan to sell the newly completed paintings as genuine Sklars, confirmed by residual DNA, after his death. Sklar, who merely feigns dottiness, soon susses out the scam and, sardonically appreciating the desperation of the perpetually emerging artist, does not spurn but rather engages Butler, to whom a terrific Michaela Coel imparts guile and passion in equal measure.
Each artist gets into the other’s head, by turns cruelly and affectionately but always, it seems, constructively, bending towards broader resolution and conciliation. The Christophers presents a credible case that, at least for some artists, making art is about cyclically losing and regaining innocence. The process is often haphazard, more improvisational than designed. A filmmaker of Soderbergh’s extraordinary peripateticism – his previous film was the spy-cum-marriage story Black Bag – seems to owe as much, overall, to departure as discipline. In The Christophers, he suggests that as long as the underpinning aptitude and commitment are there, the effort, however messy, stands to yield a sufficiency of compelling and enduring work. Civilization – maybe even civility – prevails.
The Christophers, directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Ed Solomon. Distributed by Neon, 2026.
About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
Read about the paintings used in the film here.
