Martin Scorsese's 'Killers of the Flower Moon' Review Thread

Rotten Tomatoes: 100% (5 reviews) with 8.70 in average rating

Metacritic: 92/100 (16 critics)

As with other movies, the scores are set to change as time passes. Meanwhile, I'll post some short reviews on the movie. It's structured like this: quote first, source second.

Audiences unfamiliar with Grann’s book — or with the actual history, which draws a parallel early on with the Tulsa Race Massacre — might be at a slight advantage here given that each nasty turn this ugly chapter from America’s past takes makes its depravity more astonishing. Scorsese has made an impassioned film that honors both the victims and the survivors.

-David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

It’s a difficult balancing act for a filmmaker as gifted and operatic as Scorsese, whose ability to tell any story rubs up against his ultimate admission that this might not be his story to tell. And so, for better or worse, Scorsese turns “Killers of the Flower Moon” into the kind of story that he can still tell better than anyone else: A story about greed, corruption, and the mottled soul of a country that was born from the belief that it belonged to anyone callous enough to take it.

-David Ehrlich, IndieWire: B+

Instead of focusing his cameras on the Native victims, the 'Irishman' director lets Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro have the lion's share of the screen time in this meaty but demanding true-crime saga.

-Peter Debruge, Variety

In that regard, his “Killers of the Flower Moon” is vast and vital in its scale, purpose and emotional scope, a Western-thriller and ensemble piece that is every bit a Scorsese crime picture as one can dare to imagine.

-Tomris Laffly, The Wrap

Scorsese presents a remarkable story, with an audacious framing device of a briskly insensitive “true crime” radio show featuring Osage characters crassly played by white actors. This is an utterly absorbing film, a story that Scorsese sees as a secret history of American power, a hidden violence epidemic polluting the water table of humanity.

-Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: 5/5

As such, Killers of the Flower Moon is of a piece with not only The Irishman but also Scorsese’s other recent film Silence. These works have a much more melancholic energy than his baroque, frenzied prior efforts — The Wolf of Wall Street, Shutter Island, and The Departed. The 80-year-old director is undeniably in the twilight of his career — “I want to tell stories, and there’s no more time,” he told Deadline. Fittingly, Killers of the Flower Moon is paced deliberately, almost like an elegy. It’s also one of the most rewarding projects of his long career, a sign that Scorsese has no intention of fading away — even as the film landscape transforms around him yet again.

-David Sims, The Atlantic

Killers Of The Flower Moon takes us through a very dark part of our history (and incredibly at the same time of the horrendous Tulsa massacre of 1921 just 30 minutes down the road) and if it does nothing else, reminds of just how horrible we can be to each other, a reminder needed now more than ever. That alone makes Killers Of The Flower Moon a movie that could not come at a better time.

-Pete Hammond, Deadline

For all its extravagant running time (three hours and 26 minutes!), its big-swing history lessons, and its tale of an Old West giving way to the regimentation of a modern police force, Killers of the Flower Moon turns out to be that simplest and slipperiest of things: the story of a marriage. And a twisted, tragic one at that.

-Bilge Ebiri, Vulture

Scorsese’s film is nonetheless effectively rattling, a grueling delineation of events that gracefully eschews the melodrama and sensationalism of so much true crime. Gladstone ably holds the soul of the film, while DiCaprio and De Niro provide damning illustrations of good-old-boy affability masking so much prejudice and avarice. (Jesse Plemons is also a comfortingly competent presence as an investigator from the newly formed FBI.) Those heading to a Martin Scorsese movie looking for the electric verve of so many of his past films may initially be disappointed. But as Killers of the Flower Moon seeps in, it shocks, resounds, and haunts.

-Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

Above all, it’s a Martin Scorsese picture, brimming with reverence for a culture that survived a horrible trauma as it is filled with exhilarating flourishes, film history references, and explorations of the faultline between the sacred and profane. And yes: It’s a masterpiece.

-David Fear, Rolling Stone

Weaving the Tulsa race riots, the KKK and the Masons into its tapestry, Scorsese’s opus questions the misdeeds of America in the last century while linking them to the pressing issues of today. Addressing racial violence, nationalism, the continued epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and even our lurid obsession with true crime, Killers of the Flower Moon paints a robust picture of a moment in history that invites viewer introspection. As Ernest asks portentously when reading from a book on Osage history: "Can you see the wolves in this picture?" Well, can you?

-Jane Crowther, Total Film: 5/5

In the background of all the dense, teeming action you may hear reverberant echoes of “Goodfellas” and “The Irishman,” “Gangs of New York” and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” among other indelible American epics of organized crime and tribalist violence. But you will also hear — in the agonized cries and silences of an Osage woman named Mollie Burkhart (a superb Lily Gladstone), Ernest’s wife — a story of this nation’s original sin, here compounded to a degree of monstrosity and horror that can give even a chronicler of human evil as seasoned as Scorsese pause.

-Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

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PLOT

Members of the Osage tribe in northeastern Oklahoma are murdered under mysterious circumstances in the 1920s, sparking a major FBI investigation directed by a 29-year-old J. Edgar Hoover and former Texas Ranger Tom White, described by author David Grann as "an old-style lawman."

DIRECTOR

Martin Scorsese

WRITER

Eric Roth & Martin Scorsese (based on Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI* by David Grann)

MUSIC

Robbie Robertson

CINEMATOGRAPHY

Rodrigo Prieto

EDITOR

Thelma Schoonmaker

BUDGET

$200 million

Release date:

May 20, 2023 (Cannes Film Festival)

October 6, 2023 (limited theatrical release)

October 20, 2023 (wide theatrical release)

Runtime:

206 minutes

STARRING

• Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart

• Robert De Niro as William Hale

• Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart

• Jesse Plemons as Tom White

• Brendan Fraser as W. S. Hamilton

• John Lithgow as Prosecutor Leaward

Submitted May 21, 2023 at 02:47AM by SanderSo47 https://ift.tt/NpK2CAP