New Films (2018 Edition)

[Phil_A]

Molly's Game. Aaron Sorkin's debut as director, the story of a former Olympic skier who ends up running high stakes poker games for the Hollywood elite.

The dialogue is as snappy and on point as you'd expect from Sorkin, but ultimately I'm not sure how the film expected us to feel about Molly and what she did, and the ending was a big "so what?" Also if the film was trying to drop hints as to the real identities of the famous types hanging out at the games I'm not sure I was picking up on it. I've no idea which well-known actor Michael Cera was substituting for, strange bit of miscasting there.

Jessica Chastain is great in the lead (although I will never not get her mixed-up in my head with Bryce Dallas Howard), a confident, charismatic performance, but Idris Elba really needs a better dialogue coach though as his American accent is still quite bad. It seemed like every other vowel was pure Hackney.