The art world loves a resurrection story—especially when someone else is holding the brush. A trailer and poster are out now for Steven Soderbergh (“Traffic,” “Ocean’s Eleven”)’s “The Christophers,” a tightly wound chamber comedy built around legacy, greed, and the kind of tasteful fraud that starts as a family plan and ends as a moral mess. Neon opens the film in New York and Los Angeles on April 10, with a nationwide expansion set for April 17.
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The film’s synopsis lays out the con with clean brutality. Julian Sklar was once a star of London’s 1960s and 1970s pop art explosion, but he hasn’t painted in decades and has been broke for years. His two estranged children, desperate for an inheritance, hire Lori—an art restorer and former forger—to pose as a prospective assistant so she can access eight unfinished canvases stored deep in the vault. The plan is to finish them, tuck them back away, and have the works “discovered” after Julian’s death.
Ian McKellen plays Julian, with Michaela Coel as Lori, and Jessica Gunning and James Corden rounding out the family circle that sees a dead painter’s reputation as a live revenue stream.
Soderbergh’s best late-career kick has often been this exact kind of adult pressure cooker: a small group of people in a room, every line carrying a little threat, every smile carrying a transaction. TIFF described the film as an “incisively witty chamber comedy” circling art, commerce, and avarice, which reads like a mission statement for a filmmaker who’s always understood that the most violent action in certain worlds is a decision made politely.
The script is by Ed Solomon, and the pairing has a familiar snap if you’ve followed their recent run—“Mosaic,” “No Sudden Move,” “Full Circle”—projects that like their plots clean, their turns sharp, and their adult conversations weaponized. Here, the engine is less about who pulls off the trick than what the trick does to everyone involved once the idea becomes a plan and the plan becomes a kind of shared corrosion.
Behind the scenes, the producers are Jim Parks and Iain A. Canning, with Michael Schaefer, Mike Larocca, and Corey Bayes listed as executive producers.
Neon picked up worldwide rights after the film’s Toronto premiere, continuing its ongoing Soderbergh run and setting the release on a classic platformed rollout—New York/LA first, then the wider push. Watch the first trailer below.
