The Christophers (2026) – Review by Andrea Carnevali

Ian McKellen and Michaela Cole in The Christophers

The Christophers ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A quiet little gem, controlled, deeply intimate, and powered by performances that refuse to blur into background noise. Probably McKellen’s best performance in years, and that’s saying something

Steven Soderbergh is impossible to pin down as a director. Just when you think you’ve worked out his pattern, he changes the lighting, the pace, the genre, the motifs, the whole rulebook. He seems allergic to settling into a ‘brand’, and honestly, that’s part of the fun.

From his breakout films like Sex, Lies and Videotape and Out of Sight, to the Ocean’s trilogy (the only one constant in his filmography and incidentally, another one feels like it’s been quietly cooking for years), then to his Oscar-winning Traffic and Erin Brockovich, right the way through to Contagion (which got re-discovered during Covid with spooky echoes of the world we were suddenly living in).

More recently, he’s been working ‘in the margins’ (or rather, outside the margins), making smaller, self-contained films with tighter intentions that don’t need to prove they deserve to exist. Which is probably why they often end up mattering more.

This latest film, The Christophers, keeps that trend going, and it feels oddly invigorating.

The plot device is, frankly, an excuse to get us into an intimate two-hander between Ian McKellen and Lori Butler. McKellen plays Julian, a once very successful painter, who lives as a recluse in his old double-house in London. (I don’t know whether those interiors were a real house or a set, but either way it felt wonderfully lived-in: full of history, details, and the kind of quiet clutter that suggests a life continuing even when the world moves on.)

Julian spends his days recording video messages for his fans, maintaining a strange, stubborn relationship with an audience that’s now too far away to correct him. His paintings used to sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds, but now he says, in his own words, that he has ‘painted nothing but shit in 30 years and nothing at all for 20’.

An astonishing admission, made with the bitter precision of someone who has stopped believing he can be surprised by himself.

And then Lori Butler enters, not as a love interest or a saviour, but as a function of the plot and yet somehow becomes the film’s conscience.

She’s employed by Julian’s greedy children, Jessica Gunning (from Baby Reindeer) and James Corden (from… well, nothing worth mentioning if not his American late-night show).

Their plan is for her to pose as Julian’s assistant and forge a series of legendary unfinished paintings (‘The Christophers’ from the title, named after Julian’s former lover), so that when Julian dies they can cash in.

This setup is rather ugly, transactional, and cynical, but it’s the catalyst for what becomes essentially a two-hander between McKellen and Butler.

This feels more like a theatre piece. It was written with these two actors in mind, designed for their rhythms and pauses.

But it really comes alive every time McKellen is on screen: he doesn’t just inhabit Julian, he is Julian, with all the contrasting facets of what being an old human being is about. Grumpy, incisive, funny, snarky, lonely, profound, and silly.

You never feel he’s acting, and all along you never doubt he is indeed a painter. This is probably McKellen’s best performance in years… and that’s saying something. I just loved every single second he was in.

All of which makes Lori Butler’s job even harder. Her job is mostly listening and reacting. And she does it beautifully, until she finally gets her moments. There’s a particularly impressive scene where she breaks down Julian’s paintings, almost like a careful autopsy, and in doing so she exposes Julian’s soul.

There are moments of beauty in the silences between the two, in the looks, in the quick exchanges. The film lives and dies with these two astonishing actors and a story that keeps asking what’s genuine, what’s performed, and who gets to decide the ending.

Meanwhile, the obnoxious Jessica Gunning and James Corden feel like they stepped into the wrong film, playing the greedy offspring as over-the-top caricatures, as the film needs a narrative engine to drive the plot forward.

The film ultimately has to bow down to the conventions of plot contrivance and final resolutions. That’s where it feels slightly more conventional and, in places, less satisfying than the rest of the experience.

Still, I’d happily spend hours just watching these two interact, talking, contradicting, misunderstanding, and learning from each other.

And in a landscape of loud and brash cinema and blockbusters, The Christophers is a quiet little gem, controlled, deeply intimate, and powered by performances that refuse to blur into background noise.

Playing in cinemas right now.

Andrea Carnevali is a Bafta winning film maker who lives in Chiswick, and a co-creator of the Chiswick In Film festival.

Read more film reviews on The Chiswick Calendar