Director – Steven Soderbergh – 2025 – US, UK – Cert. 15 – 100m
**
Two siblings hire a young art restorer to forge some of their famous artist father’s unfinished paintings before he dies so they can collect on their posthumous sale –out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 15th
Professional art restorer Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) runs a London fast food stall between painting restoration gigs. Then she gets a phone call and meets in a pub with Barnaby (James Corden) and Sallie (Jessica Guning), the son and daughter of ageing artist Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) who, worried that their father is about to die imminently from a medical condition, want to ensure he (for which read Lori) ‘completes’ (for which read ‘forges’) the third, unfinished series of paintings known as the Christophers after the model Julian used.
Against her better judgement, she accepts the gig, and finds herself playing the ruse of working as Julian’s assistant, basically an excuse for getting into his studio and forging the completed works on canvas as a nest egg for his children who, it later transpires, have already sold the as yet unpainted works to a buyer for a tidy sum.
That sets everything up for the main event, the meeting an interaction between the po-faced Lori, who it turns out has an agenda of her own and, as discerned by the siblings, a motive to want to take revenge on the artist. Julian, whose two completed series of Christophers paintings led to considerable artistic acclaim thirty years ago, has failed to produce any artwork of note since – possibly any artwork at all, it’s not clear – and has earned a crust by making personalised videos to fans after appearing on the tabloid art TV show Art Fights where he savages young artistic hopefuls in front of their work.
All this sounds promising enough, but the combination of Ed Solomon’s dialogue-heavy script with Soderbergh’s dialogue-reliant direction leads to what Hitchcock would have derided as photographs of people talking. Solomon wrote the much loved Bill and Ted films, so is capable of better (although the script may or may not be the problem) while Soderbergh is a director whose output I find to be uneven, to say the least: when he’s good, he can be very good – but that isn’t this movie.
Which is a shame, because McKellen is a profoundly gifted actor, whose talents are squandered here through no fault of his own, while co-star Coel, who goes through the film po-faced, a character who never lets her guard down, has a certain admirable quality – yet neither of them is able to save the current production.
The Christophers is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, May 15th.
Trailer: