THE ORDER****

I bloody love the films that Justin Kurzel makes.  They focus on disturbed and disturbing people committing or manipulating people to murder.  They feature spare stark scripts and searing brutal performances. And long-time collaborator and DP Adam Arkapaw often sets the moral corruption of man against a backdrop of stunning landscapes.  SNOWTOWN, MACBETH and most recently NITRAM gave us character portraits of tortured evil.  Kurzel's latest film, THE ORDER, casts that character study within a police procedural.

We are in early 80s small-town mid-western America and this film is based on a real-life story.  The Feds are on the trail of a young charismatic neo-Nazi who is orchestrating a series of bank robberies to fund his war on America.  His foundational text is the same one that inspired the Jan 6 insurrection.  Nicholas Hoult is the cult-leader Bob Mathews - handsome and convincing.  Mathews is sinister in how low-key he is but also how swiftly he can whip up a mob.  Jude Law continues to give career-best performances in his middle-career - following his turn as a truly sinister Henry VIII in FIREBRAND - with this self-effacing performance as a decent but scarred and often ill-judged Fed called Terry Husk.

Screenwriter Zach Baylin (CREED III) crafts a spare and slowly-ratcheting anxiety-inducing script.  The pivotal relationship is between Husk and Mathews who contain enough humanity to somehow not be able to take that pre-emptive shot. But I also loved the scenes between Hoult's Mathews an his father, a David Duke type figure played convincingly by Victor Slezak.  

THE ORDER plays like an old-fashioned police procedural, much as the recent JUROR NO 2 (also starring Hoult) played like an old-fashioned courtroom drama. I am here for it. I love the feeling of being in a handsomely-made, well-played, slow-burn, patient, unflashy, grown-up thriller.  There is nothing not to like about this film.

THE ORDER played Venice and Toronto 2024 and is available to stream on Amazon Prime. It is rated R and has a running time of 116 minutes.

TO LESLIE**

TO LESLIE is an underwritten hokey film about addiction and redemption that is almost insultingly simplistic about how easy it is to quit years of heavy drinking.  One can forgive its broad strokes as it's the debut feature of director Michael Morris and writer Ryan Binaco.  It has come to fame for the social media campaign run by feted actors to get its star, Andrea Riseborough, an Oscar nomination.  Her performance is committed and big - very big - in the films early scenes. Indeed it veers into that well-known Oscar-bait trope of getting fucked up and ugly for a nomination.  But Riseborough is a good actor, and while this isn't her best performance, I'm happy she's getting some overdue notice. But let's not get carried away about the merits of this film.

Riseborough stars in the titular role as a working class single mother who wins the lottery, blows the money, and ends up drunk and homeless.  In the film's opening scenes she reconnects with her now grown son (Owen Teague) and immediately betrays his trust by stealing money and getting high.  He kicks her out and she heads back to a home town full of people who either mock or detest her.  But she's held out a lifeline by Marc Maron and Andre Royo's motel bosses who give her a job as a maid. She cleans up and finds acceptance. The end.

There are better, more heartbreaking, and more complex depictions of addiction on screen, most notably by Andre Royo as Bubbles in TV's The Wire. Riseborough and Maron do the best they can with the script they're given.  Janney is too good for the kind of schmaltz we get in the final scene.  This is not a film of note. But it's great Riseborough is getting recognised.

TO LESLIE is rated R and has a running time of 119 minutes. It played by SXSW 2022 and was released last year in the USA.