Martin Scorsese’s latest epic Killers Of The Flower Moon has opened to rave reviews from critics, and a certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes by avid-cinema-goers.
Based on David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book, the film follows the true story of the Osage murders in the 1920s, an epidemic where members of the Osage tribe were murdered for their oil money.
While the book focuses on the FBI investigation, the Taxi Driver director decided to focus on the heart of the story, the love between Ernest Burkhart and his wife Mollie.
The star-studded cast sees Leonardo DiCarprio in the titular role alongside Lily Gladstone as his wife, and Scorsese’s other frequent collaborator Robert De Niro plays Ernest’s uncle, William King Hale.
After the movie’s tour of international film festivals, it has landed in cinemas and opened to positive reviews across the board with many citing the three-and-a-half-hour epic, a “masterpiece.” Here’s what they all had to say…
The Independent (5 Stars)
“DiCaprio, with a mouth full of rotted teeth, offers us a man who is loving and weak and ugly deep down in his soul, a man whose cheek twitches when he lies, and whose body deteriorates from guilt faster than any poison. But it’s Gladstone who provides the film’s centre of gravity. She gives one of the most extraordinary performances by a woman in any of Scorsese’s movies.”
“Yes; it’s a masterpiece. The word’s overused, sure. But what else can you call a work that finds the 80-year-old director — considered by many to be our greatest living American filmmaker and caretaker of the seventh art’s flame — turning a sprawling, three-and-a-half-hour drama involving power, corruption and our nation’s toxic past into an intimate story, without sacrificing its depth or scope?
“No one makes movies like this anymore, that go for broke yet keeps its eyes on the universal experiences of love, death, healing, and forgiveness. Maybe no one else can. But we’ve got a truly masterful example of how to do it, from an artist who hasn’t given up on the power of the moving pictures as mass-appeal empathy machines. Cinema’s not dead yet.”
Empire (5 Stars)
“A piece of work as strong and sharp and vivid as anything in [Scorsese’s] remarkable career, and perhaps one he could have made only now. How many octogenarians can honestly claim to still be working at the peak of their powers, as he so evidently is?”
Evening Standard (5 Stars)
“As Mollie, Gladstone is the star of the show, taking by far the most interesting, conflicted character and turning in a performance of aloof, understated brilliance.
“It looks beautiful, features a wealth of great performances and tells a tale that needed to be told, very well indeed. It is – genuinely – his best since The Wolf of Wall Street. Not a line that would make it on to those posters, perhaps, but impressive nonetheless.”
The Guardian (5 Stars)
“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.”
“Scorsese has drawn on assorted genres — the movie is at once a romance, a western, a domestic drama, a whodunit and, finally, a police procedural — that effortlessly mix, ebb and flow.
“It’s an energetic and unexpected amalgam, but partly because Scorsese uses genre to his ends rather than conforming to its conventions, the overall effect can be destabilizing: He’s not boxed in by obvious narrative cues, and neither are you. That means that you’re never sure where the story is headed or why, which is enjoyable and adds to the overall mystery.”
“With a complicated love story at its centre, Scorsese and his collaborators have made something that stands firmly on its own.
“Scorsese is interested more in what is between the lines, the questions that remain unanswered, how they can possibly get away with this, and how far they might go, and perhaps how far we as a nation have not come.
“Yes, it feels truly epic in many ways, but all in service to the story. I never looked at my watch.”
Killers Of The Flower Moon is in cinemas and on Apple TV+ now.