This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
How often are there two films in the same month revolving around piano tuning, asked my predecessor, Robert Hutton, last month in this column. Well, probably about as often as there are two films about an irascible, elderly artist and his unusual relationship with a beautiful younger woman.
Moss & Freud, written and directed by James Lucas, is based on fact. In 2002, Lucian Freud painted Kate Moss, then at the height of her fame. She sat for him in numerous long sessions over a period of nine months, an arduous process requiring a degree of discipline antithetical to her hard-partying lifestyle.
Despite the fact that the 79-year-old artist was a stickler for punctuality and the 28-year-old model was not best known for her timekeeping, the pair became friends. Moss has spoken about the profound impact the experience had on her.
Freud, who died in 2011, admired Moss as a free spirit who would not be reined in.
In one of Moss & Freud’s opening scenes, Kate (Ellie Bamber) goes to meet Lucian (Derek Jacobi) at the National Gallery. The camera tracks her clattering through the hallowed halls in her strappy heels, but it pauses momentarily in front of George Stubbs’s “Whistlejacket” — highly strung, unfettered, resplendent. Lucas doesn’t labour the point.
Much of the film focuses on the early sittings in Freud’s Kensington studio. Moss is somewhat jaded by excess — things got a little out of hand during a recent evening at a Berlin S&M club — and Freud is searching to fill a void in his own life. The pair chat, they bicker, they smoke opium together. They fall out and make up.
That’s pretty much it. But I was entirely gripped, partly because it looks terrific — Freud’s studio has been meticulously recreated and followers of fashion might recognise that Bamber wears some of Moss’s actual outfits — and partly because Jacobi and Bamber are so compelling.
Although Freud could be what is known in the art world as “a complete bastard”, he is portrayed as mildly curmudgeonly with a streak of vulnerability. It’s the sort of role Jacobi can do standing on his head, which his Freud does at one point to amuse Moss.
Bamber has the greater challenge, playing a woman so exhaustively reproduced in photographs. The camera that loved Kate Moss loves Bamber too. She doesn’t physically resemble the model but she gives an assured performance having mastered Moss’s speech patterns and mannerisms to the extent that it’s easy to forget we are not actually watching Croydon’s finest.
Moss might be giggly and self-effacing — “I’m a runway show pony”, she says at one point — but woe betide anyone who tries to patronise her.
In a great scene when the exasperated painter finally loses it over her habitual lateness, she gives as good as she gets, making some woundingly accurate observations about Freud’s own shortcomings.
Moss comes out of this film looking rather good, a fact possibly not unrelated to her role as executive producer. Still, I defy anyone to listen to her on Desert Island Discs and not be at least a little bit charmed by her industrial-strength name-dropping, her sudden wheezy cackle and her excellent taste in music.
Moss & Freud is reflective, evocative and ultimately rather sweet. I enjoyed it a lot — much more than I did the picture that resulted from the sittings. Neither Moss nor Freud were hugely keen on “Naked Portrait 2002” either. Nevertheless, it sold for £3.9m in 2005.
In director Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers, the fictional artist Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), hasn’t sold, or completed, a painting in years. Once a superstar, he is now a virtual recluse and his awful kids, played with relish by Jessica Gunning and James Corden, are worried about their inheritance.
They enlist Lori (Michaela Coel), an art restorer, to get a job as their father’s assistant in order to find and secretly complete a series of unfinished paintings, “The Christophers”, so that they can flog them for a fortune when he dies.
This is essentially a two-hander for McKellen and Coel. The veteran looks as though he is having fun and gives a big, showy performance.
But it is Coel, of whom we haven’t seen enough since her breakout TV series I May Destroy You, who really impresses as the quiet, watchful Lori. The film also benefits from a witty script by Ed Solomon and from Soderbergh’s brisk direction.
Both Moss & Freud and The Christophers are well worth seeing but don’t worry too much if you happen to miss them this month. Doubtless, arthouse cinemas will be screening them as a double bill for many years to come.
