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Art Features Live Action Movies

The Christophers

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.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Eternal You

Directors – Hans Block, Moritz Reisewieke – 2024 – US – Cert. – 87m

*****

People deal with bereavement with the help of interactive versions of their deceased, loved ones recreated by AI – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 28th

In a rare visual shot in this mostly verbally based documentary, an aerial shot of a graveyard, with light creating lots of little blocks of shadow as it falls on the ranks of gravestones, resembles a slice of internal computer electronics. It’s a pertinent pictorial moment that stands out from almost everything else here.

“Is there some reason you wouldn’t believe me?,” a woman asks her boyfriend. “You died,” comes the sceptical reply. Joshua, from Ontario, Canada, had to endure the trauma of watching the life support machines that were keeping her alive being switched off. After she died, about two weeks short of high school graduation which she was expected to pass, he got the school to graduate her. He later explains this by written chat to her interactive AI.

Psychiatrist Sherry Turkle talks about the problems people face coping with grief in the modern world, where they often live on their own following the death of a partner and don’t have an extended network of family around them like they would have done in former times.… Read the rest