Michaela Coel
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Steven Soderbergh on Making The Christophers With Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen
Twisty as a Hitchcock movie but not a thriller, Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is a two-hander for two great actors. Michaela Coel plays Lori Butler, a serious painter with a side gig as an art forger. Ian McKellen plays Julian Sklar, an art world star in the 1960s and ’70s who hasn’t made any work of note in decades. Julian’s children, who hate him, concoct a scheme in which Lori is smuggled into Julian’s dilapidated five-story house as a temporary assistant. She is tasked with finding “The Christophers,” a series of portraits that Julian began in his prime but never finished. If […]
by Amy Taubin on Apr 7, 2026 -
Facing the Music: David Lowery and Chloé Zhao Dig Into Mother Mary
David Lowery and Chloé Zhao have been friends and collaborators since January 2012, when they met as fellows in the annual Sundance Screenwriters Lab. In the years since, both directors have found artistic and commercial success. Much as Zhao has alternated between Nomadland and Hamnet on one hand and The Eternals on the other, Lowery has given us deeply personal films like The Green Knight as well as mainstream fare like Peter Pan & Wendy. In fact, it’s the delta between those two approaches to filmmaking, and the identity questions that arose while switching between them, that inspired his latest […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 1, 2026
