Film Review: The Christophers

Don’t forget to apply to the PSSSR’s Emerging Writers Fund. Deadline is August 20th.

Alongside Todd Field’s Tar (2022) and Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt (2025), Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers (2025) falls into a microgenre I want to call the “Inter-Generational Culture Wars Star Vehicle Meltdown” (IGCWSVM). The climax of each of these films is realized through a career-and-relationship-ending temper tantrum-cum-monologue about wokeness, cultural value, and fragile young people. These scenes, which will become essential material for Actors Studio workshops for years to come, are played with scenery-chewing intensity by each film’s protagonist: Cate Blanchett is Tar’s ambitious and lascivious conductor, Julia Roberts is After the Hunt’s cautious, brilliant and opportunistic philosophy professor, and MacKellen is The Christophers’ cranky fallen art star turned reality TV celebrity turned alcoholic shut in.

Soderbergh is one of very few directors in America who is able to make entertaining films about financial criminality, economic desperation, escapism, and the disappointments of waged work. The Laundromat (2019) is his most explicitly political film, centering on a real-life global money laundering scandal exposed by the release of the Panama Papers: 11.5 million leaked documents that uncovered a global network of 214,000 offshore shell companies used to hide assets and evade taxes for high net worth individuals (and the institutions that serve them). The data on the documents spanned nearly forty years, and revealed that the tax revenue alone on these accounts could have funded, for an equal length of time, public spending in health, education, infrastructure buildout and social welfare in countries like the U.S and the U.K.

Like the 2008 mortgage fiasco and collapse of Enron and other grand-scale frauds, the Panama Papers scandal has been fully swallowed by the maw of our socially engineered attention spans—and Soderbergh’s film is just another of his many amusing, entertaining caper films. From Erin Brokovich’s (2000) explicit confrontation with work and exploitation, cinematic class consciousness can be found even in the slickness of Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and the goofiness of Logan Lucky (2017) and the sexiness of Magic Mike (2012): their plotlines highlights an economic system bent on sucking the life and love out of its most handsome, sculpted and sybaritically talented members.