After Steven Soderbergh’s terrific 2025 double bill of Presence and Black Bag, I almost wish that, purely for the sake of variety, I could say that his new movie, The Christophers, is a dud. But I can’t. It’s terrific, and it’s the latest confirmation that Soderbergh is working with a nimbleness that no other American director at the moment can match. You might have to go back to the workhorse days of the old Hollywood studio system for such a consistent abundance of quantity and quality.

The Christophers, which was written by Ed Solomon, is a spry and witty chamber comedy, most of it set in the ramshackle London townhouse of a famous painter, Julian Sklar, played by a superb Ian McKellen. Not long after the movie begins, Julian takes on a new assistant, Lori Butler, played by Michaela Coel. What he doesn’t know is that Lori is a skilled art restorer, and that she’s been hired to infiltrate his home by his two greedy grown-up children, played by James Corden and Jessica Gunning.

Lori’s mission is to find several of Julian’s unfinished paintings — all portraits of his former lover Christopher — and finish them in Julian’s style. The plan is that when Julian dies, perhaps someday soon, the forged Christophers will be discovered and sold for millions. Lori will get a third of the proceeds.

Soderbergh has a deft way with heist and home-invasion movies, and The Christophers is, as you’d expect, full of twists and reversals. Lori has some moral qualms about taking on a forgery job, but she also has a personal gripe to settle with Julian that leads her to say yes. Also, she needs the money; as ever, Soderbergh is keenly attuned to his characters’ economic straits.

When she starts working at Julian’s townhouse, Lori mostly keeps her head down and pretends to know nothing about her boss or about art. But Julian can sense that his new assistant is more clever than she lets on.

We learn that Julian experienced a close brush with cancellation years ago, owing to some impolitic remarks he made about women artists. It’s one of many reasons his career has floundered in recent years — that, plus a general lack of inspiration and productivity.

McKellen has a sublime ability to combine gravitas with mischief, and he gives his strongest performance in years as this incorrigible old soul. I was reminded of his great Oscar-nominated turn in Gods and Monsters, as the Hollywood director James Whale, another queer artist in the twilight of a legendary career. But McKellen is matched, nuance for nuance, by Coel, an intensely magnetic screen presence whose work here is mesmerizing in its poise and restraint.

It’s no spoiler to note that Julian is too smart to be deceived by Lori for long, and once the truth begins to emerge, their battle of wits doesn’t just deepen; it turns inside out. Despite their differences — in race, gender, class, temperament and worldview — Julian and Lori are more alike than they realize, and what’s thrilling about The Christophers is the way it becomes a tart yet tender portrait of two kindred spirits.

Julian, for all his bloviating, turns out to be a more empathetic listener than he appears, and Lori, for all her initial reserve, turns out to be Julian’s rhetorical and intellectual equal. In the movie’s best scene, Lori dissects the history of Julian’s entire Christophers project, balancing rigorous analysis of his materials and techniques with unsparing insight into what each painting reveals of his emotional state at the time.

McKellen and Coel make such splendid company that I’d have gladly watched them simply trade insults for two hours. But Soderbergh and Solomon have grander ambitions, and every scene of The Christophers is springloaded with ideas. They know that it’s never been harder for artists to make a living doing what they do; it’s no coincidence that both Julian and Lori rely on side hustles just to get by.

The filmmakers also know the absurdities of the fine-art world, where the price of a painting can fluctuate wildly according to the whims of the market. Soderbergh, not for the first time, seems to be commenting at least in part on the struggles of independent filmmaking. Not unlike the New York pro-sports milieu in High Flying Bird or the Florida male strip club in Magic Mike, the studios and galleries of The Christophers can feel analogous to the movie industry itself — a place where, against crushing odds, art somehow manages to find a way.