The Christophers
—Co-starring Michaela Coel—
Meet legendary artist Julian Sklar in Steven Soderbergh's THE CHRISTOPHERS.
"A spectacular Ian McKellen plays the artist Julian Sklar, a crank, and sometimes a despicable one, but the sort you kind of love."—Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times
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Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is a blackly comic chamber piece centered on Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), a once‑legendary painter who has curdled into a glorious spectacle of ego, cruelty, and theatrical decay. Now broke, reclusive, and defiantly unrepentant, Julian spends his days hurling insults as a notorious TV art‑show judge and recording cutting personalized video messages for strangers, treating each cameo as a miniature performance of disdain and wit. When his estranged children scheme to profit from a cache of unfinished paintings after his death, their plot brings a skilled art forger (Michaela Coel) into Julian’s orbit—triggering a duel of intellect, vanity, and manipulation. At once hilarious and unsettling, the film revels in Julian’s outrageousness: a man who mistakes cruelty for honesty, spectacle for legacy, and turns even his own irrelevance into an act of savage charisma.
Screenplay by Ed Solomon