This week’s movie releases

It’s 20 years since Bobby and Peter Farrelly brought Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels together as dim-witted friends Harry and Lloyd in hit comedy Dumb and Dumber. Since then, there’s been a low-rent prequel, Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd, which neither the original stars nor writer-directors had much to do with, not to mention an animated TV series. Now, though, they’ve finally reunited for a bona fide sequel, Dumb and Dumber To (what else could you call it?). This time round the pair hit the road in search of Harry’s long-lost daughter.

Benicio del Toro steps into the blood-splattered shoes of notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in thriller Escobar: Paradise Lost. The Hunger Games’ Josh Hutcherson plays an American surfer dude who finds himself under the wing of the “King of Cocaine” after he falls for his niece. The Spanish-French co-production marks the debut of Italian writer-director Andrea Di Stefano.

There’s more of the white stuff in Kill the Messenger, which tells the true story of journalist Gary Webb and his investigations into the origins of the crack epidemic and the CIA’s involvement in cocaine trafficking in the 1980s. The Bourne Legacy’s Jeremy Renner heads a starry cast that also includes Rosemarie DeWitt, Ray Liotta, Barry Pepper, Oliver Platt, Michael Sheen, Richard Schiff and Spain’s Paz Vega. TV specialist Michael Cuesta (Homeland, Dexter) directs.

Paz Vega also crops up in Spanish crime thriller La ignorancia de la sangre (The Ignorance of Blood), an adaptation of the last in British author Robert Wilson’s series of books about Seville detective Javier Falcón. Juan Diego Botto plays the Andalusian sleuth as he tackles a double dilemma: extricating an undercover agent’s teenage son from the clutches of Islamist terrorists and finding a boy kidnapped by the Russian mafia. Alberto San Juan also stars in El juego del ahorcado director Manuel Gómez Pereira’s movie.

Identical problems

The Skeleton Twins drags comedy stars Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig into darker territory as estranged twins thrust back together by their own respective suicide attempts. Writer-director Craig Johnson’s film won the prize for best dramatic screenplay at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

After duplicating our planet in Another Earth, US indie director Mike Cahill offers another dose of high-concept sci-fi in his sophomore feature, I Origins. Michael Pitt (HBO’s Boardwalk Empire) plays the scientist trying to disprove creationists with his research into the evolution of the human eye who makes a far-reaching discovery.

Spanish exorcism drama Asmodexia, directed by Marc Carreté, sees a priest and his granddaughter pursued by a strange cult as they travel the country helping those afflicted by a fast-spreading soul infection.