THE CHRISTOPHERS
McKellen carries the whole thing quite magnificently on his pale, scrawny, octogenarian shoulders
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Ian McKellen, Michaela Coel, James Corden
Certificate: tbc
Released: 15 May 2026
Rating: 8/10
Retirement becomes Steven Soderbergh: since he announced he was folding up his director’s chair back in 2013 he’s embarked on the most productive decade of his career. Last year alone brought the genuinely uncanny thriller Presence and the superbly turned spy caper Black Bag. Now he returns with an irresistible confection of artworld chicanery.
After the Islington dinner party dream house of Black Bag, he’s back again in London, but this time it’s the rag and bone bricolage of a Bloomsbury townhouse. It’s the home and studio of artist Julian Sklar, once a Hockneyish enfant terrible, later the splenetic star of a TV show, lately a cynical purveyor of personalised cameo videos to online fans. He’s played by Ian McKellen, after lucrative decades lost in Mordor, clearly relishing a screen role that gives him something to chew on.
Indeed this might be a modern update of King Lear. With a recent terminal cancer diagnosis, Sklar’s appalling children (James Corden and Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning) are concerned with the extent of their inheritance. They hire an old art school friend with sidelines in restoration and forgery (Michaela Coel) to become an assistant to the old buzzard, surreptitiously survey the extent of the work locked up in his attic, and if possible, spirit away some of the abandoned drafts of The Christophers, his legendary portrait sequence of a lost beautiful boy, to be artfully touched up and sold on the black market. It’s up to the fierce, frail, fading Sklar to work out the worth of his ruined estate, and determine who should be its rightful heir.
It’s not a perfect film by a long chalk. There are plot holes that gape as wide as McKellen’s dressing gown (“Weinstein has ruined robes for all of us,” he drawls delightfully). Corden and Gunning seem to have wandered in from a children’s Roald Dahl adaptation. And Michaela Coel can seem too poised to be fully believable as an awkward scuffling eternal art student.
But as an artist rediscovering the thrill of creation, and the real value of his legacy, McKellen carries the whole thing quite magnificently on his pale, scrawny, octogenarian shoulders. Catch him before he returns to Magneto and Middle Earth once more.
