Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Steven Soderbergh’s AI contradiction

Soderbergh is "mystified" over AI backlash, but his latest film, "The Christophers," proves art needs a human touch

Published April 17, 2026 12:00PM (EDT)

Steven Soderbergh is a man of both expedience and innovation. In the last 15 months, he’s had three films in theaters — “Presence,” “Black Bag” and now, “The Christophers” — all with their own unique directorial style and individual ambitions. “Presence” was a ghost story about teenage loneliness, filmed from the perspective of a spirit haunting the house a grieving family has just moved into. “Black Bag” tore up spy movie conventions with its emphasis on fidelity in the field, becoming one of the genre’s most scintillating new films in years. And with “The Christophers,” Soderbergh unhurriedly wades through the art world with a sweet tale of a fading painter, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), and his new assistant, Lori (Michaela Coel), who’s been covertly hired by Julian’s children to finish (aka forge) the last of his most beloved series of portraits.

Throughout the film, the question of what gives art its value appears in several forms, challenged by Lori and Julian when their initially stilted working relationship transforms into something more intimate. As they grow closer, Lori wonders if the difference between restoration and forgery becomes moot when the person working to complete a half-finished work of art, in the original artist’s style, is doing so with the artist’s blessing. The film, written by Soderbergh’s frequent collaborator Ed Solomon, quietly asks the questions confounding creatives in the tech-obsessed age. For those concerned that artistic prowess is being deprioritized for AI, and filmmaking might soon become just another piece of content creation, left to fight for its existence in a sea of vertical videos, “The Christophers” is a modern and compelling interrogation of the future.

(Claudette Barius/NEON) Ian McKellen in “The Christophers”

By being so willfully averse to acknowledging the ways AI and art conflict — not to mention its ramifications for others in his........

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