Film Review: “The Christophers”: Ian McKellen’s Best Performance Since Gandalf Breathes New Life Into Steven Soderbergh’s Late-Style Cinema

According to the CinemaDrame news agency, an art forger played by Michaela Coel is hired to steal one of the unfinished works of an old painter in one of the few Steven Soderbergh films that still shows any sign of real life.

Editor’s note: This review was first published at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Neon will release the film in cinemas on Friday, April 10, 2026.

If nothing else, it is always a pleasure to see a new Steven Soderbergh film that actually feels alive. After the lifeless spy games of Black Bag, the post-mortem-like tricks of Presence, and the sluggish motions of Magic Mike’s Last Dance, it seemed that the prolific filmmaker’s recent path toward increasingly small and increasingly inert genre exercises had become a waste of his retirement. I never expected the answer to Soderbergh’s fatigue to be an 86-year-old man, but Ian McKellen — unquestionably delivering one of his most important performances since The Lord of the Rings — is so full of energy and vitality in The Christophers that he seems capable of reviving his director from afar.

McKellen plays a declining artist, once known as Julian Sklar, a painter who was highly respected and reached the peak of his fame in the 1990s with a series of portraits of his former lover — the Christopher of the title — before losing his reputation, becoming a kind of “Simon Cowell” figure in a ridiculous television talent show, and for unclear reasons falling on the wrong side of “cancel culture.” Now, allegedly suffering from a terminal illness, Julian lives in complete isolation in his cluttered London apartment, where the walls are covered with relics of his past success and the back rooms have turned into a storage space for painful memories.

Among those painful memories is his relationship with Christopher — a relationship that brought Julian wealth but also left him wounded. His career declined alongside it, to the point where the final eight works of his signature series have remained unfinished in a corner of his home for 30 years. His grown, sullen children (James Corden and Jessica Gunning) — still scarred by their cold and cruel upbringing and well aware that their father’s miserly nature extends to his will — hope to find a hidden fortune of multi-million-pound paintings after his death. For this reason, they hire Britain’s best art forger to enter the house as an assistant, steal these unfinished “Christopher” works, and complete them using Julian’s original materials (so convincingly that forgery would be impossible to detect).

But things are not so simple. Julian is no easy target, and Laurie (played with intelligence, sharpness, and depth by Michaela Coel) has motives for deceiving him that have nothing to do with money. The clash of interests in Ed Solomon’s screenplay sets the stage for a tense and gripping chamber piece, with traps hidden in every corner. Soderbergh is so excited by the idea of activating these traps that his camera — which he himself operates under the pseudonym “Peter Andrews” — begins to tremble the moment it enters Julian’s cramped, tomb-like apartment, as if the director were electrified by proximity to a classical powerhouse of acting.

The first 30 minutes of confrontation are among the strongest sections of Soderbergh’s post-retirement work. It begins with Julian producing a series of rapid, cameo-like video recordings priced at $149 each, and then moves throughout his duplex until nothing remains of his legacy except a backyard fire pit. Along the way, both the arrogant painter and the would-be infiltrator drop their masks, and what initially seems like another Soderbergh heist film becomes a sharp, biting — sometimes even Pinteresque — two-hander about what people take from one another and what they give in return.

Not that Julian has ever offered much beyond trouble or emotional damage. He is an abrasive artist who has little left except the ability to wound others — a skill he cultivates like a virtue. Julian knows he has fallen as an artist, but his inability to accept this decline is matched by the shrinking of his world; the world may have moved on, but he still sees himself at its center.

In a performance as intricate as his unfinished canvases, McKellen portrays him as a cantankerous, sharp-tongued man who delights in his own cruelty, yet is also imbued with a wounded surrender, without any sentimentality — a man who hurts others only because he no longer knows how to help them. He has offered his soul to the world through the “Christophers” series — perhaps at Christopher’s expense — and the experience has left him so damaged that he spends the rest of his life in a state of aggression.

In Laurie, Julian encounters someone who can put him on the defensive. Laurie, capable of perfectly forging Julian’s style yet disappointed in her own inability to create original work, becomes an unexpected mirror. She is a young, Black, polyamorous woman who is highly guarded about vulnerability, approaching every interaction with cold, controlled detachment — embodying the very figure an aging white artist might blame for his own obsolescence. Yet the two characters — for reasons that remain unclear until the film’s end — are deeply intertwined.

Watching Laurie and Julian try to understand the complex connection between them is compelling. The Christophers is at its best when these two characters use the heist plot as an excuse to explore themselves and each other. The film rarely leaves Julian’s claustrophobic apartment, but the interaction between the two painters becomes a standalone drama, and Soderbergh’s fluid, responsive camera restores a sense of energy missing from his recent work.

Yes, the film could almost function as a stage play with minimal changes, and yes, it still feels more like an exercise in Soderbergh’s efficiency than a fully realized pop-art statement; but The Christophers offers an answer to this critique. Real or fake, finished or unfinished, genre exercise or personal statement, the works we create have an impact on the world that no market can measure. And the same is true of the people who dare to create them.

Rating: B

The Christophers premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.