What to watch this weekend: Jude Law plays cops and robbers in The Order, plus disco gets its revenge | Canada Voices

The Order (Prime Video)

There isn’t much more you can ask for in a movie these days than a grizzled Jude Law, a baby-faced-but-malevolent Nicholas Hoult and striking cinematography capturing the brooding majesty of the Alberta wilderness (standing in for the Pacific Northwest). Luckily, Justin Kurzel’s new thriller The Order has all those elements and more. After playing a brief festival run this past fall, Kurzel’s film skipped Canadian theatres altogether, even though it’s just the kind of high-minded, large-scaled production that moviegoers so desperately need to shake off the blahs of Hollywood’s franchise machine.

Based on a true story, The Order follows an FBI agent (Law, cigarette constantly dangling from his mouth) engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with a pack of neo-Nazi bank robbers led by a charismatic psychopath (Hoult). The film plays like a tightly wound cross between Michael Mann’s Heat (there’s one sequence involving an armoured-car heist that will have you on the edge of your seat) and Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room (another film in which fascists built their twisted paradise in the woods). And if that’s not enough to sell you, then how about a brief appearance by comedian Marc Maron, in a rare dramatic role?

Disco’s Revenge (Crave)

Despite conventional wisdom – and the infamous Disco Demolition Night riot at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1979 – disco has, apparently, never died. That’s the thesis, at least, behind the new Canadian documentary Disco’s Revenge, which tracks the genre’s evolution from the beating heart of New York’s Black and LGBTQ scenes to the chart-topping soundtrack of a generation to pop culture’s Public Enemy No. 1. to its stealth but central influence on today’s airwaves and soundstreams. Co-directed by Omar Majeed (the 2009 music doc Taqwacore) and Peter Mishara, the film features new interviews with such pivotal music-world figures as Grandmaster Flash, Fab Five Freddy, Nona Hendryx and Sylvester and Martha Walsh, to name a few. Can the film set the boogie straight? Strap on your best bell-bottoms and find out.

The Wild Robot (Prime Video)

Continuing the proud tradition of finding deeply human stories inside the cold metallic hearts of machines, the new animated film The Wild Robot joins WALL-E and Robot Dreams in delivering top-tier children’s entertainment that could also double as beautiful silent films. Adapting Peter Brown’s young-adult book of the same name, The Wild Robot traces the journey of a droid named ROZZUM 7134 (“Roz” for short, and voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) whose cargo ship runs aground on an island some time in the distant future. A mechanical servant without a human master, Roz wanders the island trying to find tasks to accomplish, only to encounter various animals who either consider the machine a monster or want to rip its body to pieces. After learning to translate the various animals dialects – Roz is a quick study – the robot begins to form a friendly relationship with some of the island’s outcasts, including a sly red fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal) and the cynical opossum Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara). While the story is slight, writer-director Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch) elevates the sometimes-thin material with the most beautiful animation in recent memory.

The Outrun (Hoopla)

For a brief stretch of time, it seemed as if Saoirse Ronan had this year’s Academy Award for Best Actress locked up for her starring role in The Outrun, an adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s acclaimed 2016 memoir. Playing a newly sober woman who returns to her childhood home off the northern tip of Scotland, Ronan dives deep into an uncomfortable tale of universal addiction and emotional isolation – a performance that, when the film made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival around this time last year, sparked immediate Oscar buzz. Unfortunately, the film fell out of the conversation in the months thereafter, opening quietly in a few theatres this past fall. Now, though, you can rectify the Academy Awards’ mistake and revel in Ronan’s work yourself.

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (on-demand, including Amazon, Apple TV)

Directed by long-time Gerard Butler collaborator Christian Gudegast, the 2018 film Den of Thieves cast the leading man as L.A.’s sweatiest and most unethical cop, “Big Nick,” on the trail of roughneck crooks who, the film’s final moments reveal, were covertly led by a lowly bartender named Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr.). And now, in the cold and cruel early days of 2025, Gudegast has miraculously brought the gang back together for Den of Thieves 2: Pantera – no mean feat of reassembly given the first movie killed almost all the characters off except for Big Nick and Donnie. But who needs such initial stars as Pablo Schreiber and Curtis (50 Cent) Jackson when you’ve got all the big beefy boys you could possibly ask for in Butler and Jackson, who relocate to the Côte d’Azur for this trashy-but-taut exercise in turned tables and changed games.

Pulling a sort of Fast Five on Den of Thieves die hards, Gudegast’s new film finds Big Nick crossing the sides from cop to crook, teaming up with his one-time nemesis Donnie to pull off a heist inside a French diamond exchange. Having lost custody of his daughters and the badge to his job after the events of the first film, a magnificently bearded Big Nick is out of cash and out of patience – why not team up with Donnie to pull the score of a lifetime? And if Donnie refuses, well, hey, Big Nick can always call back his law-enforcement buddies over at Interpol to swoop in and make an arrest.

Gudegast is well aware that nothing in Pantera is exactly new. Much of the movie plays like Heat’s European Vacation – a dash of John Frankenheimer’s Ronin here, some of Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah there, not to mention a heaping dose of Jules Dassin’s 1955 classic French caper Rififi. But Pantera mixes its many influences into a smooth spectacle so confident and patient in its assemblage that it instantly wins you over.