Clockwise from left:
Game on: Molly Bloom
(Jessica Chastain) has
the winning hand when
it comes to running
high-stakes poker
games; Molly (Chastain)
with her lawyer Charlie
Jaffey (Idris Elba);
Debut director Aaron
Sorkin consults his
lead on set.DON’T BE AFRAID TO CUT
“When you’re writing you have to do multiple
drafts to make it better. It’s the same with
directing. There were plenty of moments that
either were better in my head than they were
in reality, or a moment that was terrific that
nonetheless had a reason to be cut from the
movie to make it better.”
USE YOUR CONTACTS BOOK
“I wasn’t able to speak to Mike Nichols [who
directed Charlie Wilson’s War], because he died a
few years ago, but I talked to a number of directors
I’ve worked with over the years. I also talked to
writers who became writer-directors. The best
advice was, ‘You should do this, because you know
how to do this even if you don’t think you can.’”
MOLLY’S GAME IS IN CINEMAS FROM 25 JANUARY
THE NEW MUTANTS — the 11th X-Men film — isn’t
exactly a superhero movie. In fact, it would
be better described as a coming-of-age horror
that just happens to have superheroes in it.
And not your average superheroes, either.
So, who are these hormonal superbeings? Well,
cooped up inside an asylum-like institution, it’s
centred around Native American mutant Mirage
(newcomer Blu Hunt), whose psychic abilities
allow her to create hyper-real hallucinations of
her enemies’ darkest fears. In the ‘Demon Bear’
run of comics on which the film is based, Mirage’s
dreams are haunted by an evil force that takes
the form of, you’ve guessed it, a demonic bear.
Mirage’s cohorts in the movie include Russian
sorceress Magik (Anya Taylor-Joy), and Scottish
shape-shifter Wolfsbane (Maisie Williams), who is
struggling to align her fundamentalist Christian
upbringing with her ability to transform into a wolf.
The gang is completed by Brazilian rich kid Sunspot
(Henry Zaga), who can harness solar power, and
Kentuckian coal miner’s son-cum-human jet plane,
Cannonball (Stranger Things’ Charlie Heaton).
You’ll find no Spandex here: just young, confused
mutants coming to terms with their powers.
Director Josh Boone made his name with
young adult blockbuster The Fault In Our Stars,
and has signed on to adapt Stephen King’s The
Talisman, so, clearly, he has a taste for both teen
angst and dark fantasy. Handy, as The New
Mutants looks to contain lashings of both.THE NEW MUTANTS IS IN CINEMAS FROM 12 APRIL 2018Meet the adolescent mutants
bringing a dash of horror to
the X-Men universeWORDS TOM ELLEN