Christian Bale doesn’t half like to pic unexpected projects, and while The Dark Knight Rises is getting ready to shoot, he’s in China filming The 13 Women Of Nanjing (previously known as Nanjing Heroes), for director Zhang Yimou. The first pics from the film have now shown up online, courtesy of Tianjinwe.com (with a nod to /Film for uncovering them). You can see them above and below, and underneath that are a couple new shots from X-Men: First Class, including a close-up look at Jennifer Lawrence as a young, but still very blue, Mystique.
In The 13 Women Of Nanjing, Christian Bale plays an American priest called John who helps a great number of Chinese escape certain death during the Nanjing Massacre, when Japanese troops entered the city in 1937, leading to hundreds of thousands of rapes and deaths.
X-Men: First Class charts the epic beginning of the X-Men saga, and reveals a secret history of famous global events. Before mutants had revealed themselves to the world, and before Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) took the names Professor X and Magneto, they were two young men discovering their powers for the first time. Not archenemies, they were instead at first the closest of friends, working together with other Mutants (some familiar, some new), to stop Armageddon. In the process, a grave rift between them opened, which began the eternal war between Magneto’s Brotherhood and Professor X’s X-Men. It hits cinemas June 3rd.