Keep an eye out for these films with an artistic focus over the next few months.

Feature films

The Christophers, dir. Steven Soderbergh

Michaela Coel has been selective with her projects since the pandemic, besides a foray into the Marvel Universe with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) and a one-episode appearance in the Prime Video reboot of Mr & Mrs Smith (2024), for which she won an Emmy. But something about The Christophers, Steven Soderbergh’s 11th feature in nine years, must have appealed. She plays Lori, an artist manquée who splits her time between art restoration and working in a food truck. Lori is recruited by the crafty heirs of the painter Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) to steal a series of paintings he’s abandoned, complete them herself and share in the profits from the sale of the partially forged works – but, naturally, things do not go as planned. Expect thrills and black comedy, two of Soderbergh’s fortes.

In US cinemas in 2026; UK release date TBD

The Gallerist, dir. Cathy Yan

The Chinese-born American film-maker Cathy Yan has an eye for the arty image: her breakthrough movie Dead Pigs (2018) featured occasional shots of hundreds of, er, dead pigs floating down the Huangpu River into Shanghai. Her new film stars Natalie Portman as a gallerist who grants an influencer named Dalton Hardberry (played, in an amusingly improbable turn, by Zach Galifianakis) a sneak preview of work by one of her artists in the run-up to Art Basel. Hardberry finds himself smitten by a ‘hyperrealist’ piece called The Emasculator, and the work promptly draws media attention – and the eye of a much bigger gallerist, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones. The film was partly shot in Paris: does this mean we can expect a satirical take on Art Basel’s Paris edition? Will the leaky ceilings of the Grand Palais make a cameo? Watch this space.

Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2026

The Love That Remains, dir. Hlynur Pálmason

Best known for his extraordinary travelogue Godland (2022), about a priest and early photographer who makes the arduous voyage from Denmark to establish a parish in the wilds of Iceland in the late 19th century, Hlynur Pálmason has a gift for capturing tense relationships in austere landscapes. His latest film is primarily a portrait of a dissolving marriage, but it is also a portrait of an artist: the wife and mother, Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir), makes prints by laser-cutting sheet metal into enormous pieces, hauling the fragments out to her farm and placing them on canvases until they rust and leave patterns that seem almost lunar. The film’s most excruciating character is a Swedish gallerist who flies out to Iceland to see her, only to pay scant attention to her work (‘Is this where you paint?’ he asks at one point, even though her works are obviously not painted) and lecture her endlessly about the health benefits of red wine. After telling Anna what we already suspected – he has no intention of taking her on – he flies off, though not before stealing one of her geese’s eggs. Anna might be a real artist, but it’s con artists who run the show.

In US cinemas from 30 January 2026 and UK cinemas from 13 March 2026

The Roots Manoeuvre, dir. Raine Allen-Miller

Details of this movie are still largely under wraps, but it’s an exciting prospect for fans of heist films or anyone who enjoyed Allen-Miller’s Rye Lane (2023), a charming romcom set in Peckham and Brixton. One of that film’s leads, Vivian Oparah, is returning to play a wedding planner who masterminds the theft of a looted artefact and uses a high-class wedding she’s organising as cover. The extent to which this comic thriller will weave in an excoriating satire of institutions/collectors clinging to ill-gotten goods remains to be seen, but the premise is tantalising enough. Also starring are Toni Collette, Paterson Joseph and the rapper Little Simz.

Release date unconfirmed; possible London Film Festival premiere

Whitney Springs, dir. Trey Parker

These are halcyon days for living museums: earlier this year Beamish, the Living Museum of the North, won Art Fund Museum of the Year, and now a similar institution is at the heart of an upcoming film by Trey Parker, one half of the minds (and many of the voices) behind South Park. The movie revolves around a spicy conceit: a young man who plays a slave at a living museum finds out that his white girlfriend’s ancestors once owned his. Initially slated for release on 4 July this year (get it?), the film has been postponed repeatedly – no doubt the recent double-season of South Park didn’t help – but is expected to see the light of day in 2026.

In US and UK cinemas in 2026

Documentaries

Artists in Residence, dir. Katie Jacobs

It’s been a big year for Lois Dodd: still painting at the age of 98, she got her first European retrospective this summer at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag. She also appears in this documentary about three women artists – Dodd, the sculptor Louise Kruger and the printmaker, photographer and illustrator Eleanor Magid – who, as single mothers in 1968, acquired a house in the East Village in the hope that their mutual support and camaraderie would help them balance the demands of artistry with those of motherhood. Kruger died in 2013, but Dodd and Magid, who is six years Dodd’s junior, agreed to be interviewed for the documentary, which is a portrait not only of three determined artists but also of a time and a place. The film premiered at DOC NYC in November and is awaiting a release.

Release date unconfirmed

Once Upon a Time in Harlem, dir. William Greaves

A preview cut of this film – which documents a party at Duke Ellington’s house attended by a who’s who of Harlem Renaissance luminaries in 1972 – sent New Yorker film critic Richard Brody into campaigning mode earlier this year: he called it ‘one of the greatest cinematic works of creative nonfiction [that he’d] ever seen’, and went out on a limb to say that if it had been released shortly after it was shot, ‘it would literally have changed the course of history’. Whether or not the film can live up to these claims, it is still one of the year’s major documentary events. The film and the party were masterminded by William Greaves, best known for Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968), an avant-garde film that is – to put it as simply as possible – a documentary about its own making. Greaves died in 2014, but considered the party and the accompanying interviews some of the most important footage he’d ever shot. His son David, one of the cameramen, picked up the torch, and gets a co-director credit here alongside his father. This is a chance to see Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow, Aaron Douglas, Richard Bruce Nugent and James Van Der Zee – to name some of the visual artists alone – hold forth about Black art-making at a time of creative ferment.

Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2026

Peter Hujar’s Day, dir. Ira Sachs

This biopic is the second consecutive Ira Sachs film in which Ben Whishaw plays an artist: in Passages (2023) he had the role of Martin, a poster designer and printer. As the title suggests, this latest film observes the New Jersey-born photographer as he tells the writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) about a typical day in his life. Shot on 16mm to enhance the low-key, diaristic feel, the movie is set entirely in Rosencrantz’s apartment, and the screenplay is taken word-for-word from Rosencrantz’s transcript of the interview she conducted with Hujar there, on 18 December 1974, for a book about the everyday lives of artists that she never finished. The verbatim nature of the screenplay makes this an unusually intimate snapshot of a life.

In UK cinemas from 2 January

Moss & Freud, dir. James Lucas

Like Peter Hujar’s Day, Moss & Freud charts the relationship between two creative figures over a brief period of time. But where Sachs’s film trades on its veracity, James Lucas’s depiction of the fractious bond between Lucian Freud and his sometime model Kate Moss (played here by Derek Jacobi and Ellie Bamber respectively) relies more on imagination. The painter’s daughter Bella introduced him to the supermodel in 2002; Freud, who was 80 at the time, was reportedly excited that Moss, 28, had expressed a desire to sit for him. The resulting picture, Naked Portrait (2002), depicted a pregnant Moss lying languidly on a bed, looking out at the viewer directly yet somewhat listlessly, her left arm and left leg crookedly mirroring each other. The painting sold at Christie’s for £3.9m (with fees) in 2005; it remains to be seen whether the film, which premiered at the London Film Festival in October and is awaiting a release, will do as well.

Release date unconfirmed