Steven Soderbergh is going nowhere. His prolific contemporary career remains one of cinema’s great wonders. The Christophers, arriving scarcely a year after the slickly entertaining Black Bag, is the second film the director made in 2025 and his 37th feature overall.
But while it bears the hallmarks of Soderbergh’s restless intelligence, this chamber drama ultimately feels slighter than the talent involved might suggest: a film elevated considerably by its performers, who prove far more compelling than the material surrounding them.
The setup has the makings of a tart industry satire. Ian McKellen plays Julian Sklar, a once-revered painter now fading into embittered irrelevance, surviving on the fumes of former genius while fronting a tawdry television art programme and flogging personalised Cameo-style video messages for cash.
Michaela Coel is Lori Butler, a struggling artist and restorer secretly hired by Julian’s grasping children (James Corden and Jessica Gunning, both lots of fun, if working on a different register) to complete and forge entries in his feted and unfinished “Christophers” series after his death.
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What transpires is essentially an extended two-hander between McKellen and Coel, and for long stretches that is plenty. McKellen brings weary grandeur and flashes of vicious verbosity to Julian, capturing both the vanity and the sadness of a man reckoning with artistic decline. Coel gives Lori an uncertain, simmering intelligence, layering frustration, opportunism and unexpected sympathy with impressive control. Together they generate a tense, witty dynamic rooted in class, age, race and competing ideas about “authenticity”.
Ed Solomon’s screenplay splashes around in these debates. Spiky conversations spiral into arguments about originality, ownership and whether art can survive commodification. Unhappily, the script never quite develops the dramatic momentum needed to sustain its ideas. Scenes drift rather than build.
Eventually, the overly laboured central question of who is really creating, exploiting or preserving the “Christophers” dissipates into abstraction. More surprising is how visually muted the whole thing feels. Soderbergh has spent decades transforming even modest material through formal razzle-dazzle, whether saturating Out of Sight or fragmenting Traffic.
Here his direction is so understated that it could be mistaken for an episode of Coronation Street. The camera dutifully records esteemed actors – including one Corrie veteran, as it happens – talking in beautifully appointed rooms, but it seldom finds the cinematic spark that might elevate the drama beyond a polished theatrical exercise.
In cinemas from Friday, May 15th
