Art, Ego, and Inheritance

Read Time:7 Minute, 38 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
The Christophers
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Genre: Dark Comedy, Drama
Year Released: 2025, 2026
Runtime: 1h 40m
Director(s): Steven Soderbergh
Writer(s): Ed Solomon
Cast: Michaela Coel, Ian McKellen, Jessica Gunning, James Corden, Ferdy Roberts, Tilly Botsford, Lucy McCormick, Le Fil, Daniel Fearn
Where to Watch: available July 14, 2026, pre-order your copy here: www.moviesunlimited.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: A forgery only works if everyone agrees to look away from the lie. THE CHRISTOPHERS takes that idea and applies it to art, family, grief, reputation, inheritance, and the stories people tell about genius after it stops being useful to them. Steven Soderbergh’s art-world dark comedy isn’t the slick heist film its premise could have become. It’s quieter, meaner, and more interested in the emotional fraud people commit long before anyone touches a canvas.

Julian Sklar, played by Ian McKellen, is a once-famous painter who lives in isolation, estranged from his adult children and surrounded by the ruins of a career that no longer works as it once did. Barnaby and Sallie Sklar, played by James Corden and Jessica Gunning, want the kind of inheritance their father’s actual life may not provide. Their solution is to hire Lori Butler, a talented restorer and former forger played by Michaela Coel, to complete Julian’s abandoned works so they can be “discovered” and sold after his death.

That could’ve easily turned into a more elaborate con game with shifting allegiances and expensive paintings moving through shadowed corners. THE CHRISTOPHERS has some of that, though Soderbergh and writer Ed Solomon are more invested in what happens once Lori and Julian are forced into each other’s worlds. The crime matters, but the conversation matters more. The real tension comes from watching two artists each carrying disappointment, pride, and a different relationship to survival.

McKellen gives Julian a bitter, theatrical, cruel, funny, wounded, and impossible to dismiss vibe, even when he’s being deliberately impossible. He has the exhaustion of someone who knows his reputation has outlived his appetite for maintaining it. He also has the vanity of someone who can’t stop measuring the world by whether it recognizes his importance. McKellen lets Julian be magnificent and petty in the same breath, which keeps the character from becoming just another aging-genius caricature.

Coel is the perfect counterweight because Lori doesn’t try to match his volume. She listens, watches, withholds, and lets silence become a strategy. Lori enters the house as someone hired to deceive Julian, but Coel plays her as too intelligent to let the job remain that simple. Her stillness has pressure inside it. She understands craft, money, resentment, and humiliation in ways Julian initially underestimates. When the film finds what works, it comes from the gap between his authority and her controlled refusal to be swallowed by it.

The best scenes in THE CHRISTOPHERS aren’t the ones that explain everything. They’re the ones where Lori and Julian test each other. Their exchanges have the shape of arguments, lessons, confessions, and traps, sometimes all at once. He wants to dominate the room. She wants to understand where the weaknesses are. Neither person is innocent, and neither is quite the villain the setup suggests. That ambiguity gives the film a richer tone than a simple inheritance scam.

Soderbergh has spent much of his career slipping between genres, experiments, and seemingly casual chamber pieces that turn out to be sharper than they look. THE CHRISTOPHERS belongs to that smaller idea, built around performance, dialogue, and the friction inside a confined arrangement. The film strolls into the room as an art-world comedy and gradually reveals itself as a story about creative ownership, resentment, and the fear of being remembered incorrectly.

That fear is everywhere. Barnaby and Sallie don’t simply want money; they want access to the version of their father that the market will reward. Julian doesn’t hate his children; he seems enraged by the idea that his life can be organized, priced, and liquidated by people who resent him. Lori doesn’t simply forge paintings; she steps into the uncomfortable space between restoration and theft, admiration and exploitation, talent and compromise. Everyone in the film wants to claim art, but almost nobody wants to face what the art costs.

Gunning gives Sallie a brittle desperation that keeps the character from being only a greedy daughter waiting for the older man to die. Corden’s Barnaby is broad by design, and there are moments where his presence threatens to pull the film toward something more cartoonish than the surrounding performances. He doesn’t derail the movie, though. The siblings are supposed to be unpleasant, shallow, and impatient with any version of Julian that doesn’t translate into financial gain. Their function is ugly, and the film doesn’t ask us to find them charming.

The art-world satire is pointed without being especially savage. THE CHRISTOPHERS is less interested in mocking galleries, critics, buyers, and collectors than in exposing how easily value gets detached from creation. The unfinished works are valuable because Julian made them, or because people believe Julian made them, or because people can be convinced they came from a hidden chapter of his life. That’s the joke and the tragedy. In a marketplace built on aura, provenance can matter more than truth.

Solomon’s screenplay gives the actors plenty to chew on, sometimes too much. There are stretches where the film seems in love with its own ideas, letting Julian’s monologues and philosophical sparring run a bit longer than necessary. The movie’s first half also takes its time arranging the emotional furniture, and patience is required before the sharper shape emerges.

Once the film tightens around Lori and Julian, though, the slower build pays off. Their relationship takes unexpected turns because it isn’t built on warmth, exactly. It’s built on recognition. Both understand what it means to have a skill that other people want to use. Both understand being reduced to function. The old genius, the useful forger, the marketable name, the disposable hand. Their connection isn’t sentimental, and that makes it more moving when it starts to matter.

The film also earns credit for resisting the most obvious version of itself. It could’ve become a punchier art-heist comedy, and that might have been more immediately satisfying to a larger audience. Instead, it follows the emotional consequences of the con. What does it mean to finish another person’s unfinished work? Is that theft, tribute, collaboration, or violation? Does the answer change if the original artist has abandoned the work? Does it change again if the person doing the copying understands the work better than the people trying to profit from it?

Those questions give THE CHRISTOPHERS its staying power. The film may move at a measured pace, but its best ideas stick. Art can be copied, sold, authenticated, misattributed, and weaponized by families who know exactly what a dead artist is worth. What can’t be replicated is the person who made it, or the mess that produced it. Julian’s paintings aren’t only objects; they’re evidence of a life nobody around him knows how to hold without trying to own.

THE CHRISTOPHERS isn’t one of Soderbergh’s most accessible films, and it won’t satisfy anyone expecting a brisk caper with twists. It’s a talky, thorny character piece that occasionally lingers too long in its own cleverness. Even so, McKellen and Coel give it the spark it needs, turning an inheritance fraud into a bruised conversation about legacy, labor, and the cost of being remembered. The forgery may start the story, but the truth is what makes it worth watching.

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