Best Weekend: ‘Suffragette,’ Joanna Newsom’s ‘Divers’ + More

Troubling catchphrase aside, Suffragette, the movie stars Carey Mulligan as a laundry worker who becomes an instrumental player in the fight for the British women’s vote, Helena Bonham Carter as one of the movement’s most driving agitators, and Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst, the suffragettes’ inciteful leader. The film is a dark look at the cost British women paid for the ability to vote, and a reminder of how recent so many of our rights were won.

Since 2002, Joanna Newsom has been spinning dense otherworldly yarns, stories as poetic as they are complicated, and singing them in her singular style. On Divers, her musical arrangements are no less impressive—harp, piano, and distorted guitar all find their place on this much more accessible follow-up to her last three-disc doozie.  

No one makes history as palatable and hilarious as Sarah Vowell, and this time it’s the Marquis de Lafayette who gets her reverently irreverent treatment. Lafayette in the Somewhat United States chronicles the story of the French aristocrat who became George Washington’s best friend, and shows us the division—and humanness—of our burgeoning country’s leaders during the American Revolution.

Based on Amy Koppelman’s 2008 novel, I Smile Back stars Sarah Silverman as Laney, a New Jersey housewife who fortifies her days caring for her husband (Josh Charles) and their two kids with booze, coke, and sex. A somewhat predictable look at a depressed housewife gives Silverman, who had recently described her own struggles with depression, an opportunity to prove her acting chops—and will blow you away.