Jurnee Smollett

The Order

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Terry fires a rifle

Masculinity on the downswing meets white supremacism on the up in The Order, a typically unsettling film by Justin Kurzel, who’s never quite topped his devastating debut, Snowtown, though this comes pretty close. The casting is unusual for something set in redneck USA. Nice, pretty Nicholas Hoult as Bob Mathews, head of a white-power outfit that’s broken away from a parent group of Nazis because it wasn’t extreme enough. And nice, diffident fellow Brit Jude Law as FBI cop Terry Husk, whose hopes of a quiet life on a new posting in Idaho are dashed when he realises he’s tangling with guys who are planning the overthrow of the US government. Both are … Read more

The Burial

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Tommy Lee Jones and Jamie Foxx sitting on some stairs

A movie called The Burial that buries its main story – it sounds like some kind of meta-joke. But it isn’t. Whether the strategy works is the real question though. The story was first told in the New Yorker and relayed what happened to a real-life Mississippi guy called O’Keefe whose struggling funeral-home business was offered a buyout in the mid-1990s by the Loewen company, a megacorp specialising in burials and, more importantly (it turns out), burial insurance. O’Keefe and Loewen agreed a deal in principle but then the trail went cold. Eventually, convinced that Loewen were sitting on their hands until he went bust, so it could buy him out for cents … Read more