THE CHRISTOPHERS (USA 2025) ***½
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Director Soderbergh teams up again with writer Ed Solomon to create a stylish chamber piece rich with dialogue and colourful characters set in the art world of forgery and deception.
The film centres on Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), a once-celebrated painter now reclusive and dwindling in relevance, and his estranged children who see his unfinished series of paintings ("The Christophers") as a potential posthumous windfall. They hire Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), a struggling art restorer posing as his assistant, to finish or forge these works so they can profit from them after his death. Lori and Julian begin a relationship that is both hateful and tolerant, which grows for the queerest of reasons. McKellen is excellent in delivering his lines, exhibiting black humour, pathos, and respect for both his character and for himself as an actor. Again, another small but wonderful entertainment from Soderbergh.
THE WOLVES ALWAYS COME AT NIGHT (Australia/Mongolia/Germany 2024) ***
Directed by Gabrielle Brady
THE WOLVES ALWAYS COME AT NIGHT -- Australia’s official submission for the 2026 Academy Awards for both Best International Feature Film and Best Documentary Feature -- offers a sweeping, yet deeply personal, docu-fiction set on the Mongolian steppes, chronicling one family’s displacement after climate catastrophe.
A hauntingly intimate portrait of a family forced to confront the unraveling of their world, the film follows Davaa and Zaya, a young herding couple raising four daughters in a life shaped by tradition, livestock, and the rhythms of the land. Their quiet resilience is shattered when a catastrophic climate-driven storm devastates their herd — and with it, their livelihood. Suddenly unmoored from generations of nomadic identity, the family must join the growing wave of rural migrants relocating to the fringes of Ulaanbaatar in search of survival. Blurring the boundaries between documentary and narrative cinema, Brady crafts a deeply personal docufiction drama co-scripted with Davaa and Zaya themselves, who courageously reenact their own journey of displacement. The result is both epic and intimate: a sweeping visual meditation on climate change’s human toll and a tender study of love, pride, and parental responsibility under crushing uncertainty.
The film has a documentary feel as the camera closely follows this Mongolian family of 6 (parents and four children) who have to relocate near the city after the story's tragedies, in which the herd is lost. Born to generations of herders in Mongolia’s immense Bayankhongor region, young couple Daava (Davaasuren Dagvasuren) and Zaya (Otgonzaya Dashzeveg) are raising their four children as they were brought up: with an intimate connection to the land and the animals they share their lives with.
Pressing topics like climate change and urban migration are also drawn to the story. Director Brady’s film captures the family's plight, especially when they start talking about how they miss the animals.
THE WOLVES ALWAYS COME AT NIGHT was shown at TIFF last year and premieres on FILM MOVEMENT PLUS April 17th, 2026.
