Now adults played by the likes of James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain and Bill Hader, The Losers Club returns to Derry, Maine to again confront unspeakable evil in It: Chapter 2, Andres Muschietti’s sprawling, character-driven companion piece to his 2017 blockbuster. Affording no easy solutions to the problems it presents, it’s a micro examination of a macro crisis, made transfixing by Bell’s warts-and-all embodiment of intolerance – a learned ethos rooted in issues of anger, insecurity and isolation, and correctable (if at all) only through a combination of pain and sacrifice.
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A portrait of the arduousness of transformation and redemption, Skin shares direct, unsettling ties to our current geopolitical moment. Her love, and the promise of a healthier sort of family, compels him to reconsider his life choices. Indoctrinated from a young age by his surrogate-parent gang leaders (Bill Camp and Vera Farmiga), Widner preaches xenophobia and division until he meets single mother Julie (Danielle Macdonald). Jamie Bell gives the performance of his career as Bryon “Babs” Widner, a face-tattooed neo-Nazi contending with his chosen white-power path, in Oscar-winning director Guy Nattiv’s based-on-real-events tale of the origins of hate – and the potential means of reversing it. Far more subdued than its summer-blockbuster brethren, it’s a showcase for Hart’s vibrant visuals and Mbatha-Raw’s heartfelt performance as a woman finding strength not from independence but, instead, from bonds of blood. The volatility of youth and the vitality of kinship (with present and former relatives) serve as sturdy thematic undercurrents for this low-key genre tale. Ruth’s flight takes her to her childhood home and her mom Bo (Lorraine Toussaint) and daughter Lila (Saniyya Sidney), both of whom have the capacity to wield swirly-colored constructive/deconstructive energy.
Director Julia Hart’s sophomore feature (co-written with Jordan Horowitz) is an unconventional superhero saga about Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who in a near future decimated by lack of rain, flees government agent Bill (Christopher Denham) while trying to control her extraordinary abilities, which manifest themselves as seismic seizures. “If something’s broken, it stays broken,” intones Bo (Lorraine Toussaint) at the outset of Fast Color, which then proceeds to show that things – and people – can be mended through the power of family, love and connection to the past.
Meanwhile, Jarmusch stages scenes of gruesomeness with a shrug-ish good humor that belies this simmering-with-anger critique of a world going, perhaps deservedly, to hell. A stellar cast that also includes Chloë Sevigny, Larry Fessenden, Danny Glover, Selena Gomez and Tom Waits (looking like a reject from Cats) go through their end-of-the-world motions with laid-back confusion and panic (they’re barely animated themselves). “This isn’t going to end well,” warns Ronnie at regular intervals, which he knows because he’s read Jarmusch’s script – just one of many instances in which the film indulges in goofy self-referentiality. In the “nice” town of Centerville, chief Cliff (Bill Murray) and officer Ronnie (Adam Driver) are forced to contend with a zombie outbreak caused by…well, maybe it’s the polar fracking that’s knocked the Earth off its axis, or the MAGA-type insanity peddled by local farmer Frank (Steve Buscemi), or simply good ol’ fashioned American materialism. Jim Jarmusch crafts an undeadpan comedy of apocalyptic proportions with The Dead Don’t Die, a Night of the Living Dead riff played for bleak satire. While Moss doesn’t hold back in depicting Becky’s ugliness, she taps into the underlying hurt and vulnerability fueling her firestorm heart, peaking with a heart-rending single-take piano rendition of Bryan Adams’ “Heaven.” There’s a vicarious thrill to watching this rocker spiral into the abyss, and then pull herself back out. Split into five chapters that are interlaced with flashback home videos of happier early times, Perry’s tale traces Becky’s journey from apocalyptic drugged-out collapse to cautious resurrection, his handheld camera exactingly attuned to his protagonist’s scattershot headspace. A mid-‘90s Courtney Love type who resides in the center of a tornado of her own making, Moss’ Becky Something leaves only chaos in her wake, much to the chagrin of her bandmates (Agyness Deyn and Gayle Rankin), ex (Dan Stevens), young daughter (Daisy Pugh-Weiss), mother (Virginia Madsen), collaborators/rivals (including Amber Heard and Cara Delevingne) and heroically loyal manager (Eric Stoltz). Elisabeth Moss gets her riot-grrrl on in Her Smell, delivering a tour-de-force performance of rampant egomania and self-destruction that galvanizes Alex Ross Perry’s film.
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