In The Christophers, An Aging Artist's Unfinished Masterpieces Are Subjects Of Speculation And Scheming The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

What happens when a painting's value depends less on what it shows than on who can claim it? Steven Soderbergh's The Christophers builds its tension around that question, following an aging artist, a forged legacy, and a family willing to treat unfinished canvases as future windfalls.

Ian McKellen plays Julian Sklar, a once-prominent painter who peaked in the 1970s and now spends his days making Cameo videos after a public fall from grace. His estranged children, played by James Corden and Jessica Gunning, see opportunity in the nine portraits Sklar left unfinished decades ago - works depicting his former lover, known collectively as The Christophers. They hire Lori, played by Michaela Coel, an artist, restorer, and former forger, to pose as Sklar's assistant and locate the canvases. Her assignment is as cynical as it is elaborate: secretly complete the portraits so they can be“discovered” after his death and sold for a far higher price.

Ed Solomon's script keeps complicating that scheme. Lori is soon told her first task is to dispose of The Christophers, which means forging copies of the unfinished works so the originals can be destroyed. From there, the film keeps shifting the ground beneath its characters, using each new revelation to reframe the relationships among Lori, Sklar, and his children.

That structure matters because The Christophers is less interested in action than in argument. Much of the film unfolds in long dialogue scenes, often in two-handers between Lori and Sklar, where the real contest is over meaning, authorship, and value. The children see the paintings as instruments of inheritance. Sklar presses Lori to say what the portraits mean to him, and what she thinks of his wider body of work. The film never tries to settle those questions with a single authoritative answer. Instead, it suggests that in the art market, perception can matter as much as facture.

The production also draws on unusually specific art-world knowledge. Solomon consulted his own family history, along with restorer Lisa Rosen, Gazelli Art House curator George Lionel Barker, Pop artist Jann Haworth, and Derek Boshier before his death in 2024. Barnaby Gorton created Sklar's canvases for the film, while Shanti Gorton advised on brushstroke performance and finishing work. The result is a portrait of artistic labor that feels grounded in studio practice even as the plot moves through fraud, inheritance, and posthumous speculation.

Soderbergh's film ultimately treats the market's appetite for scarcity as a dramatic engine. In The Christophers, unfinished work is not a flaw to be corrected, but a commodity to be managed - and that inversion gives the film its sharpest edge.

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