In between the cresting waves of mass-market holiday fare, an abundance of less-heralded movies bob in their trough. Some are long-shot Oscar bids, and some are frivolous trifles as ephemeral as sea foam. But the one that hits closest to geographic home is The Order, Australian director Justin Kurzel’s gripping, timely thriller based on the real-world cat-and-mouse game between law enforcement and Northwest-based white supremacists in the 1980s.

Jude Law always seems to have fun when he’s subverting his perfect-bone-structure origin story, and he does so here as Terry Husk, a veteran FBI agent who has been reassigned to a supposedly quieter field office after a career spent pursuing the KKK and the mafia. But a rash of bombings and robberies leads him, and a local sheriff’s deputy played by Tye Sheridan, to investigate the nearby compound of the white supremacist Aryan Nation. From there, they learn that a more militant offshoot of that despicable bunch, led by the charismatic Bob Matthews (Nicholas Hoult, putting his sidelong charm in service of a very nasty dude), are intent on obtaining enough cash to raise an army and mount a violent, racist revolution.

The Order is a taut, muscular thriller that doesn’t feel the need to elaborate the already dramatic facts of its true story. These neo-Nazis aren’t cartoonish or crazy, even if they do indulge in delusions of grandeur. What they are is scary, especially when seen as a precursor to the litany of antigovernment, right-wing “martyrs” such as Randy Weaver, Timothy McVeigh, and LaVoy Finicum. Matthews was inspired by the white nationalist novel The Turner Diaries, a book that continues to serve as an extremist bible and which had been published only a few years before his campaign of violence.

Ultimately, the biggest national impact The Order had was from the murder of Jewish progressive radio host Alan Berg (Marc Maron), who was also the inspiration for Eric Bogosian’s play Talk Radio and the Oliver Stone film based upon it. Bob Matthews hasn’t achieved the level of posthumous notoriety reached by those named above, or Ted Kaczynski, or Ashli Babbitt. But he was an early symptom of the disease of domestic terrorism that continues to fester, and even prosper, forty years later.

To be clear, even without that historical context, The Order would remain a gripping crime film, anchored by Law’s gritty, paunchy performance and including several expertly crafted action set pieces. Kurzel has made a career out of exploring eruptions of violence. His 2011 debut feature The Snowdown Murders is a harrowing depiction of Australia’s most notorious serial killer, while 2021’s Nitram goes inside the mind of the perpetrator of the deadliest mass shooting in the nation’s history. But there’s no sense, in those films or this one, of any glorification or aestheticization of those acts or those who commit them. In that sense, he’s the perfect filmmaker to tell the story of a man like Matthews, who wanted his deeds to spark others to rise up, but instead ended up as a mere footnote. (Regal Fox Tower and other area theaters)

Nightbitch: For some reason, female rage has been a recurring theme in pop culture recently, and Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel is a prime and entertaining exemplar of that trend. It’s a feminist fable that draws on primal mythmaking to make a modern point about the often-unacknowledged paradoxes and perils of motherhood: a woman who surrendered her career as an artist to become a stay-at-home mom to her toddler son finds that her ennui only begins to fade when she unaccountably begins turning into a dog every now and then. From this simple, surreal starting point, Yoder crafted a bleakly hilarious fairy tale that culminated in a bracing final act. In a post-Dobbs world, the carceral aspect of maternity is even more vivid, and writer-director Marielle Heller (Diary of a Teenage Girl) should have been able to wring gasping fury out of the tale. Instead, with Amy Adams in the lead, Nightbitch the movie oddly pulls its punches. Maybe from studio interference, maybe out of a desire to avoid seeming too strident, the film leans too heavily into its comedic elements. It’s not our heroine’s misadventures with finger paints or her ravenous canine appetite that should make her relatable, it’s her ferocious refusal to be defined and limited by the fact that she has birthed offspring. (Regal Fox Tower, Salem Cinema)

Flow: In another couple weeks, the latest Walt Disney Studios effort to make photorealistic talking animals will stampede onto thousands of movie screens. The animals in Flow are neither photorealistic nor talking, but they nonetheless provide a powerful counterpoint to the celebrity-voiced critters of something like Mufasa: The Lion King. Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis has concocted a hypnotic, wordless tale about a cat who gets swept up in a massive flood and has to team up with members of other species—a capybara, a lemur, even (gulp) some dogs—to survive. As these mismatched, desperate critters (our protagonist at many points is one soggy kitty) take refuge on a drifting boat and deal with a variety of perils, it feels a bit like The Life of Pi without Pi, or like Noah’s Ark without all that insistent pairing off. The landscapes are lovingly rendered, and the animals, despite being rendered somewhat crudely, have personality to spare. (Hollywood Theatre, Regal Fox Tower, Cinema 21, and other area theaters)

Queer: Daniel Craig takes on the boldest role of his post-James Bond career in this adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s autobiographical novella, written in the 1950s but unpublished until 1985, at least partially because of its explicit depiction of homosexuality. Lee (Craig), Burrough’s alter ego, is an American expat junkie living in Mexico City who becomes besotted by a handsome younger man (Drew Starkey) and eventually embarks on a journey to Ecuador in search of the ayahuasca that he thinks will enable him to telepathically communicate. The film is directed by Luca Guadagnino, the effusively florid chronicler of obsession behind Call Me by Your Name, Bones and All, and, most recently, Challengers (also written by Queer screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes). He brings his trademark visual luxury to bear, which sometimes serves as an operatic juxtaposition to the sordid milieu, but other times just feels indulgent. Craig is bravely miscast—for one thing, it seems unlikely that the heroin-addicted Burroughs was ever this buff—but manages to conjure the cynical sadness behind Burroughs’s eyes in more than a few scenes. Extra fun is provided by a puffy Jason Schwartzman as one of Lee’s fellow travelers in debauchery and, especially, by Lesley Manville as a bonkers botanist living her best life in the middle of the Amazon. (Hollywood Theatre, Cinema 21, opens at Living Room Theaters on 12/13)

The Return: Ralph Fiennes is overdue for an Oscar. He won’t get it for this film, although his performance as Odysseus in this adaptation of the last section of The Odyssey is among his finest. (He might have better luck with his less visceral work in Conclave.) In any case, it needs to be said. The last time he was even nominated for an Academy Award was in 1997 for The English Patient, which bears mentioning because his Oscar-winning costar in that movie, Juliette Binoche, here plays Penelope, the long-suffering queen who has been fending off suitors while her husband’s famously circuitous route home from the Trojan War stretches on for years. In that time, their son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) has grown to manhood, and the kingdom of Ithaca has descended into misery following the departure of so many soldiers bound for war. If you remember your 10th-grade literature class, you know that Odysseus finally returns, incognito at first, and confronts both his aspiring usurpers and his own failings as a husband and a father. Fiennes is more than fine, lending his Shakespearean gravitas to a role that demands a classical approach, and Italian filmmaker Uberto Pasolini, a veteran producer directing just his fourth film, emphasizes the sparse physicality of the ancient Greek landscape and its populace. One of the oldest human stories about war culminates with a raw examination of the costs to those who fight in them, to those they leave behind, and to the nations they put their lives on the line for. (Regal Fox Tower, Living Room Theaters, and other area theaters)

Y2K: What if all of the potential computer glitches that prompted the Y2K scare at the turn of the millennium turned out to be real? And what if a scrappy band of teens were the only ones who could save their hometown (and maybe the world) in the wake of that disaster? The premise has potential, but this lazy genre-spoofing comedy doesn’t fulfill it. Generic shy nerd Eli (Jaeden Martell) and his extroverted best pal Danny (Julian Dennison) finagle their way to a 1999 New Year’s Eve party where Eli’s dream girl (Rachel Zegler, who deserves better) is in attendance. But when midnight strikes, and all technology melds together into killer robots, they’re all forced to go on the run. Well, except for Danny, the most amusing character in the film, who is unceremoniously killed off in the first half hour. Among the juvenile miscreants-turned-saviors-of-humanity they meet are a Pauly Shore-esque stoner played by director (and Saturday Night Live alum) Kyle Mooney. Sadly, Mooney and co-writer Evan Winter settle for a Pauly Shore level of humor, epitomized by the relentless series of “jokes” that are really just mentions of things that were prominent in the late 1990s. Case in point: Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst appears as himself and ends up leading a singalong of George Michael’s “Faith” that helps to save the planet. Okay, that bit was funny. But overall, Y2K is not OK. (Regal Fox Tower and other area theaters)

Get Away: It’s not often that a film’s title also functions as a review of the film, but this is one instance. A typical British family, including dad Nick Frost and mom Ainsling Bea and their kids, arrive at an isolated Swedish island for a vacation getaway. The island is famous as the site of a terrible historic massacre, and when the unfriendliness of the locals and the creepy vibe don’t deter them, it seems we’re in for a parody of The Wicker Man (which Frost, along with cohort Edgar Wright, already tackled in Hot Fuzz) mixed with a parody of Midsommar. The premise has potential, but this lazy genre-spoofing comedy doesn’t fulfill it. (I’m sensing a theme.) There’s a twist you can see coming for miles, and nothing very original about what comes after it’s revealed. (Regal Fox Tower and other area theaters)

ALSO THIS WEEK

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found: This informative if overlong documentary brings to light the astonishing, sad story of Cole, a Black South African photojournalist who chronicled life under apartheid in his home country but had to flee in order to publish his work. Emigrating to New York City in 1966, he published a book, House of Bondage, that exposed the oppressive conditions and violence of South Africa’s white nationalist regime. He later worked on projects capturing images of the American South, but ultimately faded into obscurity and later moved to Sweden. The spark for this film, narrated by Lakeith Stanfield as Cole, was the discovery of 60,000 of Cole’s negatives in a Stockholm bank vault. This prompted a resurgence of interest in his work and a legal battle between his heirs and the foundation claiming to own some of the most valuable of the photos. (Saturday and Sunday, Hollywood Theatre)

Curse of the Weredeer: Fans of the notorious Troma Entertainment won’t want to miss this Oregon premiere of the latest proudly juvenile product of that venerable institution. Director Ben Johnson will be in attendance, and plenty of Toxic Avenger-style fun is sure to ensue. (Saturday, Hollywood)

The Invisible Raptor: After a top-secret experiment goes wrong, a hyper-intelligent invisible raptor escapes the lab and begins wreaking havoc in the surrounding neighborhood. When the creature’s identity is uncovered, it soon becomes clear that a disgraced paleontologist—alongside his ex-girlfriend, an unhinged amusement park security guard, and a local celebrity chicken farmer—is the town’s only hope for surviving the raptor’s ravenous rampage. (Sunday, also 12/15; Cinemagic)

The Great Divide: This entertaining locally-made dark comedy gets, I think, its first public screening in town since the sold-out premiere screenings at the McMenamins Kennedy School theater back in October. ArtsWatch spoke with the minds behind it then. (Monday, Clinton St.)

Power of the Dream: In 2020, as social justice protests gave voice to frustrations with the racist impact of policing, a group of WNBA players rallied against Republican Georgia Senator and co-owner of the Atlanta Dream Kelly Loeffler over her comments criticizing athletes for expressing political opinions. This documentary follows that movement and its support for Loeffler’s opponent in the 2020 election, Raphael Warnock. (Wednesday, Cinema 21)

Fungi Film Fest: The fifth annual celebration of mycological movies is sure to provide fans of yeasts, molds, and mushrooms (but mostly mushrooms) with a wide variety of entries from seventeen different countries. (Thursday, also 12/15; Cinema 21)

PORTLAND-AREA REVIVALS/REPERTORY

Friday

• First Cow [2019] (5th Avenue Cinema, through Sunday)
• Gone Girl [2014] (Hollywood)
• Gremlins [1984] (Cinemagic, also Saturday & Wednesday)
• Santa’s Slay [2005] (Cinemagic, on VHS)

Saturday

• The Psychotronic Afterschool Christmas Special (Clinton St.)
• Black Orpheus [1959] (Clinton St.)
• Blast of Silence [1961] (Hollywood, also Sunday)
• Die Hard [1988] (Cinemagic, also Tuesday)
• A Hard Day’s Night [1964] (Tomorrow Theater, with pre-film panel discussion)
• The Holiday [2006] (Hollywood)
• National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation [1989] (Cinemagic, also Sunday & Thursday)

Sunday

• Fist of the North Star [1991] (Hollywood, on 35mm)
• Last Holiday [2006] (Tomorrow Theater)
• The Muppet Christmas Carol [1992] (Kiggins, through Tuesday)
• The Sugarland Express [1974] (Kiggins, Hollywood; new 4K restoration)
• Tokyo Godfathers [2003] (Cinemagic, also Monday & Thursday)

Monday

• Carol [2015] (Hollywood)
• Home Alone [1990] (Cinemagic, through Wednesday)
• The Third Man [1949] (Kiggins)

Tuesday

• Eastern Condors [1987] (Hollywood, on 35mm)
• Miller’s Crossing [1990] (Clinton St.)

Wednesday

• Cat’s Mill [1993] (Clinton St., presented by Church of Film)

Thursday

• National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation [1989] (Hollywood)
• Project A-ko [1986] (Clinton St., with live improvised score)

ALSO OPENING

Devils Stay: After the sudden tragic loss of his daughter following an exorcism, a renowned heart surgeon refuses to face the reality that his child has died, despite declarations from medical examiners and even the priest who performed the expulsion. But as the funeral rites begin, mourners start witnessing unnerving changes to the girl’s body, leaving the priest to wonder whether something much more sinister—an evil more ancient than Catholicism itself—may once again be looming over them all. (Eastport Plaza)

Interstellar: Christopher Nolan’s 2014 sci-fi epic, in which Matthew McConaughey leaves his daughter (who grows up to become Jessica Chastain) behind to embark on a space mission in the hopes of saving humanity, returns to theaters in IMAX for its tenth anniversary. (Lloyd Center, Bridgeport Village)

Standing on the Shoulders of Kitties: From the Trailer Park Boys Extended Cinematic Universe: While Bubbles and his band, “The Shitrockers,” are playing shows around Nova Scotia, a viral internet clip lands them a European tour opening for Billy Bob Thornton and the Boxmasters. With Randy as their roadie, they head to Prague but soon get kicked off the tour, busking to survive. Can Ricky and Julian come to the rescue? (Clackamas Town Center, Progress Ridge)

Werewolves: Two scientists try to stop a mutation that turns people into werewolves after being touched by a super-moon the year before. (area theaters)