YNOT at the Movies

Academy award winning director Steven Soderbergh has long proven that he can do more with less than almost any filmmaker working today. With "The Christophers" (UK/USA 2025 | 100 min.), he strips everything back to its barest, most essential form, and the result is nothing short of arresting.

A young painter and sometime-forger named Lori (Michaela Coel) is hired by the estranged children of aging artist Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) to infiltrate his cluttered London home and complete a series of long-abandoned canvases. The series, known as The Christophers, represents some of Julian's most personal and unfinished work, its incompleteness tied to a past love whose absence haunts both the paintings and the man himself.

Julian's children's scheme is straightforward enough: get the canvases finished, get them sold, and secure an inheritance before the old man dies. What unfolds from this decidedly corrupt arrangement is one of the most captivating exchanges between two characters you're likely to see on screen this year. Savvy audiences may find themselves ahead of the story at times, as certain turns telegraph themselves early, but the journey remains compelling enough that predictability rarely diminishes the pleasure of watching it unfold.

Ian McKellen delivers what can only be described as a masterclass. As Julian, caustic, brilliant, broken, and achingly lonely, he inhabits a man reckoning with mortality, irrelevance, and a lifetime of self-imposed emotional exile. Every line lands with the weight of decades behind it. He can be devastating and darkly funny within the same breath, and watching him dissect his own character's subtext feels like witnessing something genuinely rare. This is acting at its most fearless and most human.

Michaela Coel more than holds her own opposite him. Her Lori enters the story under false pretenses, yet she makes her completely magnetic, sharp, guarded, and electrified by the world she has stepped into. The chemistry between the two artists is the film's beating heart, and their exchanges crackle with intelligence, antipathy, and a strange, grudging tenderness that neither character quite knows what to do with.

What's refreshing, genuinely and deeply refreshing, is Steven Soderbergh's confidence in restraint. Working from Ed Solomon's tightly crafted screenplay, he trusts that two extraordinary people in a room talking is more than enough. There are no elaborate set pieces, no narrative pyrotechnics. Just faces, words, and the weight of what goes unspoken. A reported 33-minute dialogue sequence in the film's second act could feel like a risk; instead, it feels like a gift. His camera, handheld inside Julian's house and deliberately steady outside it, keeps you subtly unsettled without ever calling attention to itself, direction so assured it disappears into the storytelling.

The house itself functions almost as a third major character: a monument to self-imposed seclusion, packed with the accumulated detritus of a brilliant life half-lived. Production designer Antonia Lowe has crafted a space that feels genuinely inhabited and genuinely haunted.

The film is a reminder, one we apparently need, that a film can be intimate in scale and enormous in emotional scope. It is funny, sad, morally thorny, and largely satisfying despite its occasional predictability. In an era of relentless visual noise, the filmmakers have made something genuinely radical: a story about art, legacy, family, and fraud that trusts its audience completely.

"The Christophers" opens in theaters on Friday, April 17, 2026.