It seems like Steven Soderbergh might have developed a late case of anglophilia, the retirement-teasing director situating himself in London for three films within the last two years. The first was a needless, throwaway Magic Mike sequel, but then this spring he gave us the delicious spy caper Black Bag, a juicy riff on both John le Carré and Agatha Christie that dared to imagine a monogamous and supportive marriage as the epitome of sexiness. Unlike Woody Allen, who cursed us with a string of London-set clunkers after Match Point (Cassandra’s Dream, a film that cast Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor as cockney brothers, easily the most heinous), Soderbergh seems to be sticking around for reasons other than a nice holiday, his second offering of 2025 also feeling notable. It’s a quieter project than his last, a delicate two-hander closer to an intimate stage play, but it finds him playing in yet another unexpected part of the sandpit, a director thrillingly seeking new challenges.
Like that film, it seems inspired more by storytelling than simple technique (unlike the fantastic Covid-set surveillance thriller Kimi or the hard-to-love ghost story Presence) and again he’s reunited with a screenwriter he’s previously worked with before. Like the frequent Soderbergh collaborator and Jurassic Park scribe David Koepp, writer Ed Solomon has also mastered the art of taking a blockbuster cheque. His credits include Charlie’s Angels, Men in Black, Super Mario Bros and, more recently, the Now You See Me movies, but his first film with Soderbergh was 2021’s ensemble crime drama No Sudden Move, and he’s brought another smaller, more character-driven story his way. The Christophers is a talky, at times incredibly funny, comedy drama with plot reversals that make it feel like it’s on the verge of a thriller. It doesn’t end up there, at least not strictly, but it’s unpredictable enough to never make us entirely sure just where it’s heading.
A bit like Soderbergh himself who keeps finding new ways to surprise us, unlike many of his peers who have refused innovation and embraced something closer to stagnation this year (looking toward Spike Lee and Danny Boyle here), this is a smart and cool little film that casually finds itself becoming about more than one would expect, weaving threads about the nature of fame, the responsibility of critics, the arrogance of genius and the danger of gatekeeping. At its centre is a blistering, brutal performance from Ian McKellen as Julian Sklar, a once-brilliant painter who sullied his name over time with awful behaviour, both off and on TV, serving Simon Cowell-level bile on a junky show called Art Fight. Now, separated from the world he looks down on in his crumbling, yet expansive, London townhouse, he makes money through embarrassing Cameo videos.
He’s cursed with two vile, talentless children (Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning and James Corden) who have little to no real relationship with him (he blames their mothers as they raised them), but they’re obsessed with the money they might still be able to squeeze from him. There’s an ongoing set of portraits – The Christophers – that have gained a mythical reputation and while no one on the outside knows they’re unfinished (the previous Christophers were worth millions) the siblings intend to hire an expert to finish them so that when their father dies, they can con their way into a fortune. They pick Lori (Michaela Coel), an art restorer who doubles as a food truck server, living a quietly unfulfilled life that now has the potential to mean something. She has to pretend to be Julian’s new assistant and the pair begin an unusual relationship, filled with mistrust, anger and revenge.
It’s another exhilarating late career opportunity for McKellen to really bare teeth, following on from The Good Liar and The Critic, but this time he has a script that’s actually able to match him. There’s so much exquisite awfulness to Julian’s dialogue, usually ranted at his bewildered “assistant”, rallying against a modernity that has rendered him a relic, a victim he believes of so-called cancel culture (when Lori is unhappy with his inability to dress appropriately around her, he chastises Harvey Weinstein for ruining the bathrobe). It does render the two-hander a little lopsided for the most part, though, with Coel forced into a withdrawn mode of tongue-biting listener. But Solomon’s script has something up its sleeve that explains her recessiveness, fully revealed in a gently devastating, if not entirely surprising, last act scene.
Their relationship doesn’t get easily filed away in ways that we have come to expect. It’s not mentor and mentee, it’s not closed-off grump slowly warming to wide-eyed youth, it’s something far more complicated and evolving and watching them figure out what they may or may not mean and represent to the other is a prickly joy, an effortless, pacey game of top-tier tennis. For all the care put into their dynamic, though, Gunning and Corden are left playing characters so awfully one-note, it feels like they’ve walked on set from a Beethoven sequel. It’s not their fault but more Solomon’s script which isn’t always as sleek and rounded as one would hope from a Soderbergh project. By the finale, his many strands don’t tie up with quite enough of the elegance or poignancy I had hoped for (David Holmes’s score does try admirably, reliably hard to up the melancholy throughout) but even playing in a more minor key, Soderbergh has us easily humming along.