Scorsese’s scathing work about the exploitation of the Osage tribe in the 1920s by conniving White men is both intimate and expansive at the same time, and so well-paced that it makes 3½ hours feel like only two. 

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I am as passionate a Martin Scorsese fanboy as any out there but even I was questioning the runtime for his latest picture.  However, after viewing Killers of the Flower Moon, I was left with no doubt that the duration was perfect, not a moment longer or less, though I wished it could go on for another hour. 

The film is so well-paced that it makes 3½ hours feel like only two.  Only an elite-level filmmaker like Scorsese could have delivered, in his own terms, what might be one of the year’s very best films. 

A scathing work about the exploitation of the Osage tribe in the 1920s by conniving White men, Killers of the Flower Moon takes its time to set up its premise, drawing us into a world just after WWI, where greed and corruption would take flight in abhorrent ways. 

With the swagger of a young rebel encountering rather explosive material, Scorsese effortlessly fashions an utterly compelling work that is part historical lesson, part crime Western, and also a cultural window into the lives—and fates—of the wealthy Osage community. 

As they ‘mysteriously’ die one by one, a mounting sense of abject misery permeates the space of this seemingly utopian world of cultural integration. 

“Can you find the wolves in this picture?”

Leonardo DiCaprio is exceptional in playing Ernest, a tortured man who marries, Mollie, an Osage woman (an excellent Lily Gladstone, whom I first saw in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 drama, Certain Women). 

Robert De Niro has a supporting role as the uncle to Ernest, a rich old man with sinister aims, though he feels like a second lead considering the amount of screen time he has. 

Accompanied by a brilliant soundtrack from the late Robbie Robertson (featured by Scorsese in his 1978 concert film on ‘The Band’, The Last Waltz) who gives a guitar-tinged twang to the visuals, sometimes energetically, but most of the time a self-sustaining, almost wall-to-wall ‘musical tiptoe’ that seems to be spying on the characters. 

An essential drama that is both intimate and expansive at the same time, Killers of the Flower Moon would make a great thematic double-bill with P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007).

Grade: A

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