Wednesday, February 5, 2025

A Smattering of Recent Releases

Tye Sheridan and Jude Law in The Order.

The Order
(available on Apple+), based on Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s book The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America’s Racist Underground, is taut and gripping. It tells the true story of a secret white supremacist organization housed in the Pacific Northwest – the brainchild of a young man named Bob Mathews who splintered off from the Aryan Nation because he found them too weak-minded, all talk and no action – which the FBI uncovered and busted in 1985. Like other violent self-proclaimed revolutionaries (Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, for one), Mathews uses William Luther Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries, published under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, as a guidebook. He prepares to declare war on the U.S. government by staging, with a small cohort, a series of robberies and bombings and the murder of Alan Berg (played in the film by Marc Maron), a confrontational Jewish radio talk-show host in Denver who has been taking on rabidly anti-Semitic callers.