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“Can you find the wolves in this picture,” Ernest Burkhardt ( Leonardo DiCaprio ) reads aloud as he works his way through a children’s book early in Martin Scorsese ’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The wolves aren’t really hidden at all, and they won’t be in the film that follows either, a masterful historical drama about evil operating in plain sight. One of the most disturbing things about Scorsese’s ambitious adaptation of David Grann ’s non-fiction book of the same name is how little of its vile behavior stays in the shadows. This is the story of men who treated murder almost mundanely, issuing orders to have people killed like they would order a drink at the bar. Scorsese walks that fine line between telling a very specific story of a couple at the heart of a tragedy and commenting on the larger nature of evil. The wolves in "Killers of the Flower Moon" don’t hesitate to think that what they’re doing might be wrong as long as it profits them in the end.

After being pushed off their property to the presumed wasteland of Oklahoma around the turn of the last century, the Osage Nation was stunned to find itself the recipient of the earthly gift of oil, making them the wealthiest group of people in the country per capita relatively overnight. Naturally, the people who had claimed a country they never owned wanted a piece of this action, leading to a battle for land in the region, a conflict that turned a man named William King Hale ( Robert De Niro ) into a legend. While just a cattle baron himself, Hale was a kingmaker in the Osage region. He was able to play the political games that made him an ally to both the Osage and the white people in the area while working behind the scenes to line his pockets. De Niro gives one of the best performances of his career as a man who prefers to be called "King," rivetingly capturing the kind of sociopath who can sell murder with a smile. He doesn’t stab you in the back. He looks you in the eyes as he does it.

Hale senses someone easily manipulated in his nephew Ernest, who has returned home from the war, ready to be a good soldier for a new cause. Ernest starts as a driver in the area for the wealthy Osage, which leads him to Mollie ( Lily Gladstone ). The two marry just before Mollie’s family and other members of the Osage population are murdered one after another. Mollie’s sister Anna ( Cara Jade Myers ), who is married to Ernest’s brother Bryan ( Scott Shepherd ), is found shot by a creek on the same day that another Osage Nation man is shot. Mollie loses a sister to something called “Wasting Disease,” and discovers that she has diabetes herself, leading to bedrest that makes her an easy target for the evil growing in this region, possibly even in the heart of her husband.

Ernest, Mollie, and Hale are the trio around which everything in Eric Roth & Scorsese’s script orbits. But this tapestry of a historical drama is populated with dozens of other memorable characters and familiar faces, including Jesse Plemons as a BOI agent who would lead the investigation into the Osage murders, John Lithgow and Brendan Fraser as conflicting attorneys in the case, Tantoo Cardinal as Mollie’s mother, and a fascinating array of musicians turned actors that include Charlie Musselwhite, Sturgill Simpson , Pete Yorn , Jack White , and a memorable Jason Isbell , who gets a juicy role as Bill Smith , a brother-in-law of Ernest who could be trouble.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” may not be a traditional gangster picture, but it's completely in tune with the stories of corrupt, violent men that Scorsese has explored for a half-century. And yet there’s also a sense of age in Scorsese’s work here, the feeling that he's using this horrifying true story to interrogate how we got to where we are a hundred years later. How did we allow blood to fertilize the soil of this country? Scorsese and Roth took a book that’s essentially about the formation of the F.B.I. by way of the investigation into the Osage murders and shifted the storytelling to a more personal perspective for both Mollie and Ernest. Through their story, the film doesn’t just present injustice but reveals how intrinsic it was to the formation of wealth and inequity in this country. It hums with commentary on how this nonchalant violence against people deemed lesser pervaded a century of horror. The references to the Tulsa Massacre and the KKK aren’t incidental. It's all part of the big picture—one of people who subjugate because it's so easy for them to do so.

Of course, Scorsese's visions don’t work without his team of collaborators, and he’s brought in some of the best to tell this tale. Rodrigo Prieto ’s cinematography is sweeping when it needs to capture the vast territory of the Osage Nation but can also be intense with a sweaty close-up. Robbie Robertson ’s thrumming score is practically a character, giving the film a heartbeat that adds tension to its notable runtime. This story wouldn't have nearly the same momentum with a traditional, classical score. Finally, Thelma Schoonmaker is partially responsible for Scorsese’s sense of rhythm as director, and “Killers of the Flower Moon” is one of her most notable accomplishments. Some will crack jokes about the editing given the runtime of Scorsese’s longest film but think of the scope of this multi-year saga and how deftly Schoonmaker helps pace the final piece, pushing us forward through our nation’s violent history without ever losing the thread of this complex saga.

As for performance, there’s inherent power to seeing Scorsese’s two muses act opposite each other for the first time since " This Boy's Life " as De Niro and DiCaprio fuel each other’s performances with what's basically another tale of an abusive father. But Gladstone will be the revelation for most people. The standout of “ Certain Women ” knows exactly how to play this role, never leaning into melodrama and always grounding her character in the truth of the moment instead of playing a stand-in for all Indigenous victims. There are times when it feels like “Killers of the Flower Moon” could spin out into a broader political statement, but the performances, especially Gladstone’s, keep the film in the truth of character. The whole ensemble understands this element, playing the reality of the situation instead of treating it like a history lesson. Mollie Burkhardt didn’t know her saga would help found the FBI or bring light to injustice a century later. She just wanted to survive and love like so many who were robbed of those basic human rights.

In the end, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is like a puzzle—each creative piece does its part to form the complete picture. When it’s put together, it’s depressingly easy to see the wolves. The question now is, what do we do when we find them?

In theaters on October 20 th and on Apple TV+ at a later date.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Rated R for violence, some grisly images, and language.

206 minutes

Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart

Robert De Niro as William King Hale

Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart

Jesse Plemons as Tom White

Tantoo Cardinal as Lizzie Q

Cara Jade Myers as Anna Kyle Brown

JaNae Collins as Rita

Jillian Dion as Minnie

William Belleau as Henry Roan

Louis Cancelmi as Kelsie Morrison

Tatanka Means as John Wren

Michael Abbott Jr. as Agent Frank Smith

Pat Healy as Agent John Burger

Scott Shepherd as Bryan Burkhart

Jason Isbell as Bill Smith

Sturgill Simpson as Henry Grammer

John Lithgow as Prosecutor Peter Leaward

Brendan Fraser as W.S. Hamilton

Martin Scorsese

Writer (book)

David Grann

Cinematographer

Rodrigo Prieto
Thelma Schoonmaker
Robbie Robertson

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User reviews

Killers of the Flower Moon

When oil is discovered in 1920s Oklahoma under Osage Nation land, the Osage people are murdered one by one - until the FBI steps in to unravel the mystery. When oil is discovered in 1920s Oklahoma under Osage Nation land, the Osage people are murdered one by one - until the FBI steps in to unravel the mystery. When oil is discovered in 1920s Oklahoma under Osage Nation land, the Osage people are murdered one by one - until the FBI steps in to unravel the mystery.

Martin Scorsese
David Grann
Leonardo DiCaprio
Robert De Niro
Lily Gladstone
1.2K User reviews
365 Critic reviews
89 Metascore
125 wins & 399 nominations total

Ernest Burkhart

William Hale

Mollie Burkhart

Prosecutor Peter Leaward

W.S. Hamilton

(as JaNae Collins)

Kelsie Morrison

Byron Burkhart
Paul Red Eagle

Non-Hon-Zhin-Ga …

Chief Bonnicastle

All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

What Scorsese Film Ranks Highest on IMDb?

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Did you know

Trivia Martin Scorsese said that when he read David Grann 's book "Killers of the Flower Moon," he knew that he had to make it into a movie. Scorsese spent several hours together with Chief Standing Bear to convince the Osage Nation to help with the filming.
Goofs At the end of the spanking scene, De Niro hits DiCaprio so hard that the paddle breaks, with a splintered crack in the middle of the paddle. An indication that this was accidental comes with De Niro attempting to hide it behind his leg, while the next scene has an unbroken paddle placed on the floor against the podium.

Ernest Burkhart : I don't know what you said, but it must've been Indian for "handsome devil".

Alternate versions The Australian theatrical version was cut for an M rating, given on 9 Oct 2023. The uncut version was previously rated MA15+ on 5 Sep 2023. Based on the two classifications, 'strong injury detail' was removed or replaced to obtain the new, more accessible rating.
Connections Featured in Amanda the Jedi Show: Never Trust the Standing Ovations | CANNES 2023 Indiana Jones, Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Soundtracks Bull Doze Blues Written by Henry Thomas Performed by Henry Thomas Courtesy of Document Records

User reviews 1.2K

reelreviewsandrecommendations
Nov 18, 2023

The Movies of Martin Scorsese

How long is Killers of the Flower Moon? Powered by Alexa
Are there subtitles for the non English script parts?
October 20, 2023 (United States)
United States
Bartlesville, Oklahoma, USA
Apple Studios
Imperative Entertainment
Sikelia Productions
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$200,000,000 (estimated)
$68,026,901
$23,253,655
Oct 22, 2023
$157,026,901

Technical specs

Runtime 3 hours 26 minutes
Black and White
Dolby Atmos
Dolby Digital
IMAX 6-Track

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Killers of the Flower Moon Reviews

Lily Gladston's performance is the only reason to see this movie. "Killers of the Flower Moon" is a grueling, punishing experience to sit through. Anyone with a half a brain could edit an hour out of this movie, blindfolded.

Full Review | Original Score: ONE STAR | Mar 18, 2024

That it remains riveting and accessible despite the gravity of the subject matter is a testament to Scorsese's storytelling moxie, a lived-in screenplay credited to the director and Eric Roth, and Thelma Schoonmaker...

Full Review | Mar 11, 2024

Gladstone’s performance is unlike anything else in Scorsese’s work.

Full Review | Mar 8, 2024

Terrible things have indeed occurred throughout history. Are we doing anything to change that in the future? Or are we simply devouring their pain greedily?

Full Review | Original Score: A | Feb 28, 2024

While Killers of the Flower Moon is a reflection of the incessant need to document suffering through a white lens, reluctance to commit to the very real and ongoing pain, Lily Gladstone, the Indigenous cast, as well as the Osage Nation, shines brightest.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 27, 2024

Killers of the Flower Moon’s 'Greenbook' approach to the Osage murders, misses a crucial perspective. While Lily Gladstone shines, the film's angle disappoints.

You have to admire a filmmaker that makes a piece of art that means something to them and does it their way regardless of the commercial issues and does it through a company where most of their content is seen at home.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Feb 12, 2024

Killers of the Flower Moon is not so much a whodunnit as a whydunnit: a penetrating exploration of hubris and fall, of trust and betrayal, of evil, sin and greed.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 7, 2024

With a runtime like that, I understand why you may have been loathe to see it in the cinema. But you’ve really got no excuse now.

Full Review | Jan 26, 2024

One of the Osage council, discussing the need to seek help from Washington, describes white men as, "Buzzards circling, waiting to pick the body clean." As metaphors for colonialism go, it's hard to top.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 25, 2024

Even if I want less of Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio as the conspirators and more of Lily Gladstone as the latter’s wife and victim, it’s impossible to deny Scorsese’s artistry. Even flawed, it’s an immense film.

Full Review | Jan 18, 2024

For Martin Scorsese, the evil of men is a devouring monster. Something he explores in depth in Killers of the Flower Moon, his most ambitious film. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Jan 18, 2024

Armed with a strong vision, a great ensemble cast and a compelling story, 81-year-old Martin Scorsese does in his “Flower Moon” what he can be counted on to always do: deliver one of the most well-told stories of the year.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 15, 2024

Lily Gladstone provides the soulful counterweight to the amorality of those who see her and those like her less as humans than resources to be exploited and discarded when used up.

Full Review | Jan 13, 2024

It wouldn’t be in my all-time Top 5 of Scorsese films. But that’s not the metric at work here. It’s still a brilliant movie and one of the best films of the year.

Full Review | Jan 2, 2024

With Killers of the Flower Moon, Lily Gladstone, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Scorsese deliver a well-crafted epic that contextualizes white, American terror. The Osage Nation is simultaneously present and reduced in the film.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 1, 2024

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON is worth every nano-second of its three-hour and twenty-six-minute running time. A masterpiece about grief and injustice where the perpetrators are the people who are usually shown as the heroes.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2024

It's not a eulogy for these men, for this way of life, for the realization that they’ve lived it all for nothing — it’s a eulogy for a country, for an entire culture of people who are being washed away by the unrelenting violence of white men.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jan 1, 2024

What elevates it is Scorsese’s candid admission that, as a filmmaker marked by his own limited experiences, his role is a storyteller, an old sage paying tribute to the dead and unearthing the humanity lost to decades of injustice and inequality.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 31, 2023

[Director and co-writer Martin] Scorsese’s vision is masterful as he confronts the sensitive subject matter in a respectful manner.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Dec 30, 2023

Killers of the Flower Moon is a devastating snapshot of America’s truth laid bare

Scorsese’s latest demands — not asks — us to witness the horrors the US has wrought upon the Osage Nation and understand some of what it means for Indigenous people to survive in this country today.

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

Share this story

A woman in a gray dress and a man in a white shirt and slacks sitting together in the front of an empty church.

No film could ever hope to fully convey the scale and gravity of the inhumane violence that white colonial settlers and their descendants have inflicted upon North America’s Indigenous people like the members of the Osage Nation for multiple centuries. But with Apple TV Plus’ much-anticipated historical crime drama Killers of the Flower Moon , director Martin Scorsese sets out to shine a harsh light on that horrific aspect of the US’s all-too-recent history and illustrate how it’s very much part of this country’s living legacy.

Based on journalist David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book by the same name , Killers of the Flower Moon is a disturbing chronicle of how the Indigenous community living in Oklahoma’s Osage County was rocked by a two-decades-long string of brutal murders following the unexpected discovery of oil on their land at the turn of the 20th century. Like other tribes, the Osage are no strangers to loss and being displaced by the American government when we first meet them decades before masses of other people begin flocking to Oklahoma of their own volition.

From the moment that a group of young Osage men first stumble upon one of the countless oil deposits that dot the land they legally own, though, the fate of the entire Osage Nation takes a dramatic turn. The sudden, sustained influx of wealth almost immediately turns the Osage into literally the richest people in the entire country. But along with the Osage’s wealth comes a naked jealousy from white outsiders who see Indigenous people as undeserving simpletons, and Killers of the Flower Moon details how that very kind of thinking culminated in one of the most singularly unconscionable, nefarious murder campaigns in American history.

A group of four Native American women sitting together on the ground in front of a store while they fan themselves and enjoy pastries.

To this day, it’s still unknown exactly how many Osage people were murdered during the “Reign of Terror” as part of plots hatched by white people to gain ownership of their valuable oil headrights. But Killers of the Flower Moon attempts to honor those lost lives through its focus on Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), one of the many Osage who were encouraged to see white rancher William King Hale (Robert De Niro) as something of a local hero and to refer to him by his middle name as a sign of respect.

In some regards — like the way Killers of the Flower Moon briefly foregrounds a startling, beautiful depiction of the Osage truly thriving in luxury after surviving generations of abuse — the film succeeds in its attempt to show you a small facet of who those murdered Osage were and the greatness that was rightfully theirs. But as its focus turns toward Mollie — a taciturn yet loving Osage woman who feels a deep responsibility to look out for her sisters Minnie (Jillian Dion), Anna (Cara Jade Myers), and Rita (JaNae Collins) and their elderly mother Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal) — the movie’s approach to humanizing its characters becomes far thornier in ways that are both admirable and deeply questionable by design.

Many details of Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth’s screenplay are pulled directly from Grann’s book and work to highlight the larger system of economic disenfranchisement that was forced upon newly moneyed Osage through a corrupt guardianship program . But Scorsese and Roth’s narrativization of the historical record also centers Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) — Hale’s nephew and accomplice — alongside Mollie. And while their stories are undoubtedly interconnected, it’s a choice that ultimately makes Killers of the Flower Moon feel like a film largely crafted with white audiences in mind.

That might come as a surprise to non-Indigenous viewers given how frequently Mollie and everyone around her shift to speaking in Osage, and the movie’s commitment to spelling out exactly how racist, violent, and genuinely malicious the very culture of self-identified “ Good White People ™” often is. By focusing on Ernest and his willingness to smile in the faces of people he later mutilates, it’s impossible not to see Killers of the Flower Moon as a self-aware exercise in subjecting viewers to the brutalization of non-white people in order to make points about its own subject matter and the act of turning these kinds of stories into “prestige” entertainment.

Killers of the Flower Moon is often a film of subtlety, particularly in the way it shows you how innocuous aspects of everyday life like medicine, food, and alcohol can be weaponized by authority figures under the auspices of minding someone else’s health. But it is also a movie of explicitness — both in terms of the heinous scenes of violence it forces you to look at and the way Scorsese uses the last 15 minutes or so to challenge his audience to reflect on what it is about this story that compelled them to watch.

By doing this, Scorsese all but acknowledges the imperfections of this work and asks us to ask ourselves why, for example, people have been so quick to have fun with memed images from the film or gloss over criticisms of it from actual Osage people . Killers of the Flower Moon is not a perfect film or even one that’s representative of who the Osage were and are outside of their history surviving in spite of being systemically persecuted. But it is very much a moving, devastating, and utterly tremendous piece of cinema that you absolutely owe it to yourself to see.

Killers of the Flower Moon also stars Jesse Plemons, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Jason Isbell, William Belleau, Scott Shepherd, Everett Waller, Yancey Red Corn, and Tatanka Means. The film is now in theaters and will be streaming on Apple TV Plus soon.

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Killers of the Flower Moon Review

Martin scorsese’s native american epic is unapologetically vicious by design..

Killers of the Flower Moon is now streaming on Apple TV+. This review originally ran following the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

Killers of the Flower Moon is as brutal as they come. It spans dozens of murders over several years, across a herculean 206 minutes that allow you to dwell on its brutality in a way few movies ever do. Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth take the many details of David Grann’s journalistic non-fiction novel and adapt them into textures and background tapestries, while keeping the focus squarely on a toxic love story set against a chilling vision of Native American genocide.

Scorsese’s two most prominent on-screen collaborators, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, are finally united in one of his films, lending it infinite star power. However, the real revelation here is Lily Gladstone as the wealthy Osage tribeswoman Mollie Burkhart, who falls in love with DiCaprio’s chauffeur character, but soon begins to see her family and culture slowly die in front of her. Gladstone turns in a stunning performance that starts out as sweet and powerfully self-assured – but that aura soon slips away as if the life were gradually being drained from her body, and from her eyes.

Killers of the Flower Moon is about a string of murders in Oklahoma in the 1920s whose victims were all part of (or connected to) an oil-rich Native community – one whose wealth was placed under white “guardians” by the U.S. government – but the murders were barely investigated at first. Where it most differs, however, is that in the book Grann held all the cards close to his chest, revealing the bumbling (but downright inhumane) culprits and their methods only gradually, once the newly formed Bureau of Investigation (the precursor to the FBI) began putting the pieces together. Scorsese and Roth, on the other hand, depict these specifics pretty much from the outset, making the sprawling conspiracy feel shockingly out in the open. According to Grann’s book, it was said that many white men of the time didn’t consider killing a Native American to be murder, but rather animal cruelty. All that’s left for Bureau detective Tom White (Jesse Plemmons) to do, when he shows up late into the story, is to elicit confessions for what everyone already seems to know.

It’s a murder mystery told from the murderers’ point of view, packing a nauseating emotional punch thanks to how brazen its conspirators can be about killing a people they deem beneath them – for financial gain, no less – given how much power and political influence is on their side. In this way, Killers of the Flower Moon functions as an extension of (and a focused metaphor for) one of America’s original sins: the mistreatment of its Native populations across the centuries, and the casual carnage wrought upon them with little consequence.

What's your favorite Martin Scorsese movie?

However, its Osage characters aren’t rendered as mere sympathetic victims. They are, in terms of screen time, secondary only to DiCaprio and DeNiro’s quietly vicious characters, who hide behind their friendship to the Osage. DiCaprio plays Ernest, the enthusiastic lackey whose charm becomes buried beneath complicity, while DeNiro plays his seemingly benevolent uncle, the scheming cattleman and business magnate William Hale, who audaciously refers to himself as “The King of the Osage Hills.” But the perspective of the Osage tribe is central to Killers of the Flower Moon’s success. The script was heavily re-written with Osage input – and it shows – so in addition to the brutality enacted upon them, this story is just as much about their culture, from their rituals and beliefs surrounding birth, death and marriage, to the ways they move through the world. There are enough fully-formed Osage characters that everything from reverence for tradition and tribal meetings to gossip and flirtatiousness is on full display. It gives us a vivid and deeply human sense of what (and who) was lost.

Although it’s set in the 1920s, Killers of the Flower Moon functions as a self-reflexive Western, from Rodrigo Prieto’s gorgeous landscape cinematography, to Robbie Robertson constant musical reminders of the genre at every turn. The conspiracy’s many perpetrators are framed within the conventions of the classic Western, as well as the classic mob movie; they’re black-hatted outlaws and untouchable gangsters scheming in code (but again: shamelessly in the open). Where until very recently Hollywood had so frequently and pervasively seen Native “savages” victimize innocent white characters, the tables are turned here; Scorsese expertly folds real and cinematic histories together, exposing one while subverting the other.

What especially keeps Killers of the Flower Moon interesting despite its epic length is its breakneck momentum, whether through Scorsese’s fluid camera movements, editor Thelma Schoonmaker’s propulsive cuts, or an expert combination of the two. The subject matter may be somber, but this is a Scorsese movie through and through, with a litany of minor parts played by instantly recognizable actors (like Brendan Fraser and John Lithgow) and scenes of snappy dialogue that make each bit of planning and plotting feel like something out of Goodfellas. It’s disarmingly fun, but it also knows exactly how and when to yank you out of comfortable and familiar modes of movie-watching, with stark reminders of the viciousness and bloodthirst lurking just outside the frame (and often inside it, too).

The lengthy runtime has the advantage of making something heavy settle in the pit of your stomach for extended periods, not unlike the last hour of Scorsese’s The Irishman, in which learning the details of a secret murder plot becomes stressful and harrowing. Only this time, the plan is visible for almost everyone to see – every white character, at least, and the camera is complicit, too – making it even more dread-inducing. It becomes all the more depressing given the ease with which violence is perpetrated against the Osage, even within the confines of supposedly just systems, which seem unlikely to convict white men of these crimes to begin with.

Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon Images

And yet, perhaps its most riveting scenes are those focused on the genuine love story between Mollie and Ernest, in all its euphoria and all its difficulties, filtering the broken trust between America’s Natives and its colonizers down to a domestic dynamic. It’s a multi-faceted relationship with a glowing, realistic allure. But given the troubling circumstances (and Ernest’s connections to unsavory actors), nearly everything about this central romance is called into question. The brutality of violent bloodshed can be just as painful as the brutality of doubt, as both Mollie and the audience are led to wonder how genuine a man like Ernest is capable of being. Can he be trusted, let alone redeemed, when his actions so directly fall under what political thinker Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil,” referring to the thoughtlessly routine way Nazi officers obediently and uncritically carried out their duties?

Since the perpetrators are known to the audience, Killers of the Flower Moon instead allows the questions of Ernest’s morality and complicity to become its central mystery through Mollie’s eyes, ultimately coming to a firm conclusion, in the form of an emotionally nauseating payoff. This focus on the weight of Ernest’s actions, and the question of his own awareness of them, guides the movie’s rhythms and keeps us tethered to its emotional uncertainties, even when it feels bold and self-assured in its cinematic pleasures. But while this allows for a conclusive plot, it doesn’t afford us a true sense of emotional closure, a choice Scorsese makes and then emphasizes in a mischievously meta-textual way, all but owning up to the fact that the violence seen on screen here still has long-lasting implications today.

Like the lives of its Native characters, even the most energetic scenes in Killers of the Flower Moon come with numerous caveats, as death lurks not around every corner, but on the Main Street of every American town. It wears a friendly and familiar smile.

Like the novel on which it’s based, Killers of the Flower Moon offers a detailed portrait of the Osage tribe, the infamous murders committed against them in the 1920s, and the life of Mollie Burkhart, who saw most of her family slain. As Mollie, Native actress Lily Gladstone brims with innocent love and ferocious anger, delivering a performance that’s sure to launch her into Hollywood’s stratosphere – especially as she holds her own against compellingly corrosive work from De Niro and DiCaprio, as men whose warm benevolence is always underscored by an icy chill. It’s one of Scorsese’s most brutal films, yet one of his most thoughtful and self-reflexive, as he crafts a subversive murder “mystery” that leaves no lingering questions save for one. It’s a question that defines the tide of American history: Just how far are people willing to go for greed?

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Dramatic and Moral Ambitions Clash in “Killers of the Flower Moon”

By Anthony Lane

For fans of James Dean, nothing beats the moment in “Giant” (1956) when an oil well erupts. Dean raises his arms and bathes in the rich rain. Clocking in at three hours and twenty-one minutes, “Giant” chimes with Martin Scorsese’s latest movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which, not to be outdone, is five minutes longer still. In an extraordinary sequence, near the start, we see men of the Osage Nation, stripped to the waist, dancing in slow motion, and in unfeigned joy, as a shower of oil falls upon them. It may be the one happy vision in the entire film. From here on, oil will take second place to another precious commodity that gushes with the aid of human know-how. There will be blood.

Written by Scorsese and Eric Roth, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is adapted from the nonfiction book of the same title by David Grann, a staff writer at this magazine. Grann explores the quest for oil under Osage country, in Oklahoma, in the springtime of the twentieth century, and the auctions at which leases for drilling were purchased from Osage landowners. (A single lease could cost more than a million dollars.) In 1920, one reporter, describing the newfound Osage wealth, proclaimed, “Something will have to be done about it.” What was done is soon revealed in the film, as vintage stills of the Osage, posed in their finery or in resplendent automobiles, make way for other images, composed by Scorsese with equal calm: dead bodies of the Osage, viewed from above, laid out on their beds. A voice-over gives their names and their ages, adding, “No investigation.” If they are being murdered, nobody seems to mind.

Grann ranges wider, in time and in territory, than Scorsese is able to do. The book arrives at the dire proposition that there was “a culture of killing,” with Osage victims numbering in the hundreds, many of them missing from official estimates. As often as not, they were slain for their “headrights,” shares in the mineral trust of the tribe. (Were an Osage woman to meet with an unfortunate accident, or succumb to a puzzling illness, her rights would pass to her nearest and dearest—a grieving white husband, say.) Grann homes in on a bunch of characters in and around the towns of Gray Horse and Fairfax, and Scorsese does the same. We meet an elderly Osage widow named Lizzie (Tantoo Cardinal) and her daughters, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), Minnie (Jillian Dion), Rita (Janae Collins), and Anna (Cara Jade Myers). Then, there is William Hale (Robert De Niro), a cattle owner, prosperous and genial; he cultivates warm relations with the Osage and speaks their language. No one could accuse him of modesty. “Call me King,” he declares. Hale has a nephew, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is not long back from the First World War. He served with distinction as a cook.

You may be wondering who, of all these folk, will be the lodestone. For Grann, it’s Tom White, who, in 1925, was sent by J. Edgar Hoover, of the Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner of the F.B.I.), to delve into the Osage deaths. White cuts a genuinely heroic figure, upright and just, and his sleuthing guides us surely through the skeins of evidence. He shows up in the movie, too, but not for a long while, and—although he’s well played, with a courteous tenacity, by Jesse Plemons—in no way does he bind events together onscreen as he does on the page. Instead, bewilderingly, it is Ernest Burkhart whose fortunes we are invited to follow. Huh? This dumb dolt, with bran for brains? Why should he take center stage?

Early in the film, Burkhart has a talk with his uncle, who asks whether he is fond of women. “That’s my weakness,” Burkhart replies. “You like red?” Hale inquires, and we realize that he wants to marry Burkhart off to an Osage woman, like an aunt in Jane Austen trying to hitch an unpromising nephew to a local heiress. The slight difference is that very few aunts in Regency England, as a rule, arranged to have notable persons bumped off with poisoned hooch or shot in the back of the head. Hale doesn’t merely hope for Osage lucre in the long run; he wants it now, by whatever means necessary. “If you’re going to make trouble,” he says, “make it big.” Everything to come is foretold in this conversation. Burkhart does indeed court Mollie and make her his wife, to the satisfaction of his scheming uncle and to the detriment, I would argue, of suspense. Somehow the very appearance of De Niro, in a Scorsese film, is enough to give away the plot.

The loyalty of directors to their actors is a noble trait, and often a highly productive one. Think of the troupe that rotated around Ingmar Bergman, shifting between major and minor stints; in 1957, Max von Sydow was a medieval knight, bestriding “The Seventh Seal,” and then a gas-station attendant, in “Wild Strawberries.” No less faithful, Scorsese (who used von Sydow in 2010, in “Shutter Island”) has turned repeatedly to De Niro and DiCaprio, and some of the results have been stupendous.

DiCaprio, however, is a curious specimen. The more agonized the roles into which Scorsese has plunged him, in films like “Gangs of New York” (2002) and “The Departed” (2006), the less DiCaprio has been at liberty to flourish his prime asset—namely, his boyishness. He strikes me as a perennial kid, adrift in a land of grownups, and only truly at ease when he can lark around. That’s why his best and his most believable performance was back in 2002, in “Catch Me if You Can,” directed by Steven Spielberg, whose casting eye is unrivalled, and who spied the essential lightness in DiCaprio. Scorsese, on the other hand, has strained to drag him into the dark. If their happiest collaboration is in “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013), it is because, for once, the actor’s puckish vagaries are not reined in. Scorsese loosens the leash.

I would love to report that DiCaprio is rejuvenated by “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Sadly not. He does get to banter with De Niro, during a car ride, but listen to the topic under discussion: the killing of an Osage man, Henry Roan (William Belleau), which was meant to resemble a suicide but went awry. We can’t help laughing along with Hale and Burkhart, as if they were two goons in a Scorsese Mob movie; meanwhile, the thought of poor Roan gets lost in the mix. Such is the dilemma that weighs upon this film. Although its moral ambition is to honor the tribulations of an Indigenous people, it keeps getting pulled back into the orbit—emotional, social, and eventually legal—of white men. Mollie is diabetic, and Burkhart gradually suspects that the insulin injections he is giving her may be doctored; yet the focus remains more on his clenched and frowning perplexity than on her wasting away.

More than once, Mollie refers to herself as “incompetent.” This is not a joke but a formal term, which the film, for some reason, never bothers to define; many Osage were considered ill-suited to handling their own funds, which had to be administered by a white guardian. Yet it is a joke, as dark as oil, because Lily Gladstone, as Mollie, is unmistakably the most compelling presence in the movie. Her gait is dignified and unrushed, her humor is vented in a high and lovely yelp, and her smile is deliciously knowing and slow—so knowing, in fact, that it’s hard to imagine what Mollie sees in Burkhart, whom she calls a coyote. It’s not as if she’s blind to his basic motive. “Coyote wants money,” she says. All of her sisters make their mark; Myers, especially, does a wonderful job as Anna, who is handsome, wanton, fiery, and fatally drawn to the bottle. But Mollie is at the core of the family, and Scorsese, to be fair, does her proud with a scene in which a crowd of onlookers, gathered near a corpse that has been found by a river, parts in silent respect to let Mollie through. The camera takes the part of the bereaved.

If you relish that kind of staging—people being shifted, smoothly or brutally, around the frame, the better to boost the narrative sway—then Scorsese, aged eighty, is still the guy you need. Check out the sequence, for example, in which a wanted man is arrested. He sits in a barber’s chair, in the foreground; when lawmen enter from the street, behind him, we notice them well before he does. Even as they draw close, he stays put, making no effort to scuffle or scarper, and that simple quiescence proves that his hour of reckoning comes as no surprise. Hell, it might just be a relief.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” is rife with such passages of action and inaction, in tune with its symphonic stateliness. Themes of oppression, vengeance, and resistance are developed and recapitulated throughout, and there’s also a strange coda, in which Scorsese himself turns up. He plays an announcer on an old-school radio drama, which retells the saga of the Osage murders, complete with cheesy sound effects. Needless to say, the heroes of the show are Hoover’s boys from the Bureau. Is Scorsese claiming that, in contrast to this low-rent travesty, he has reclaimed the original terrors of the case; or is he, more humbly, confessing that his film is just one more version of a tragedy that can never be fully fathomed or explained? Next time, perhaps, an Osage voice will tell the tale anew. ♦

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‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Review: Martin Scorsese’s Osage Murders Movie Is Overlong but Never Slow

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.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Taking a cue from the movie’s soon-to-be-infamous spanking scene between Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio , someone ought to paddle whoever let Martin Scorsese take three and a half hours to retell “ Killers of the Flower Moon .” You could read David Grann’s page-turner — about an audacious 1920s conspiracy to steal resources from the Osage people by murder — in less time, and you’d learn a whole lot more about how J. Edgar Hoover and the newly formed FBI used this case to establish their place in American law enforcement.

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Scorsese opens on prosperous times for the Osage people, who’d become the wealthiest Americans per capita, thanks to the countless oil derricks that cover their bland land. That made them obvious targets to be exploited. Early on, the director draws a direct line between the Osage Murders and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, referenced via old-timey newsreels — both cases in which white supremacists couldn’t stand to see others prosper, counting on a biased legal system to cover their crimes.

But this isn’t the story of one murder. Taking a page from “Goodfellas,” Scorsese runs through half a dozen suspicious deaths right upfront, dismissed without investigation, including a “suicide” where we see someone shoot an Osage woman through the chest, then restage the scene by placing the gun near her hand. That’s the climate into which DiCaprio’s character, an opportunistic World War I veteran named Ernest Burkhart, moves to Fairfax, Okla., where he soon finds himself participating in the killings. Ernest’s first stop off the train is his uncle William “King” Hale’s place, where the well-connected cattleman (played by De Niro) welcomes him to town, glad to have the perfect patsy.

Ernest doesn’t realize it, but the scheme is already underway. For it to work, King needs his nephew to marry Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman who’s too sharp not to recognize a gold digger, but too trusting to imagine just how sinister her suitor’s intentions may be. Almost right away, her relatives start dying of suspicious causes. One sister succumbs to a strange “wasting disease,” another is discovered with a bullet wound to the back of her head, and the third dies in an explosion so big, it blows out all the windows for a mile in every direction.

No question, these crimes are unconscionable. To make audiences feel the revulsion, Scorsese shoves the victims’ bloody skulls in our faces — except he knows full well that audiences crave “whackings.” In a way that seems almost strategic, given the running time, the murders perversely become a thing to look forward to, carrying viewers through long dry stretches of drama till the next horrific execution. With each death, the family fortunes flow toward Mollie, whose headrights can legally pass to her husband, if she so bequeaths it — all as King had foreseen.

The country’s ambivalence toward Natives makes their job easy, and without getting bogged down in context, “Killers” illustrates some of the ways the system was designed to defraud them — such as certifying a number of Osage “incompetent,” such that white men would be assigned to administer their trust funds. Others charge the Natives outrageous prices, or take insurance policies on their debts, the way King does Henry Roan (William Belleau) before bumping him off.

Politically well connected, King had the authorities in his pocket and the nerve to conduct a fair amount of his scheming out in the open. Instead of telegraphing his duplicity, De Niro lays on the charm, serving as a kind of godfather figure to everyone in Fairfax — though King’s actions suggest that every line might be uttered with fingers crossed behind his back.

The obvious way to tell this story — the one Grann took for his book — would be as a criminal investigation. But the movie makes a stronger impression asking audiences to identify with the killers, while showing how this conspiracy impacted the Osage Nation. On a couple occasions, Scorsese takes us inside tribal council meetings, where Native spokesmen complain that no one cares about the murders in their midst. If they want the deaths investigated, they’ll have to pay for it themselves. When they finally send a representative to Washington, D.C., to address the Indian Affairs office, that man winds up bludgeoned to death in a ditch. And when Hoover dispatches a former Texas Ranger, Tom White (Jesse Plemons), Ernest and King hardly give him the time of day.

White eventually cracked the case, much to the FBI’s glory, though that part of the film nearly grinds to a halt as Mollie teeters on death’s precipice — as indicated by visions of the owl her mother identified as an omen before her own passing. In a chilling scene, this once-proud, stoic-even-in-outrage woman looks her husband in his paunchy, pathetic face and demands to know what he gave her. Scorsese constructs the movie’s drawn-out climax around Ernest’s choice: Will he protect King to the bitter end, or will he testify against his uncle and maybe save Mollie in the process? The decision comes down to the fate of his children, who somehow got short shrift in the preceding three hours.

So how does Scorsese justify the running time? Shooting the film on location in Oklahoma, he and DP Rodrigo Prieto immerse audiences in the oil-rich community, featuring street races and downtown parades, plus a stunning scene in which King’s fields burn, like the hellish inferno in “Days of Heaven.” Picnics and powwows provide more than just production value, situating this incredible story within a singular place and time.

Reviewed at Christine 21, Paris, May 12, 2023. In Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition). Running time: 206 MIN.

Production: An Apple TV+, Paramount release and presentation of an Apple Studios, Imperative Entertainment, Sikelia Prods., Appian Way Prods. production. Producers: Martin Scorsese, Dan Friedkin, Bradley Thomas, Daniel Lupi. Executive producers: Leonardo DiCaprio, Rick Yorn, Adam Somner, Marianne Bower, Lisa Frechette, John Atwood, Shea Kammer, Niels Juul.
Crew: Director: Martin Scorsese. Screenplay: Eric Roth, Martin Scorsese, based on the nonfiction book by David Gann. Camera: Rodrigo Prieto. Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker. Music: Robbie Robertson.
With: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, Jason Isbell, William Belleau, Louis Cancelmi, Scott Shepherd.

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‘Killers of the Flower Moon’: An admirable yet vexingly uneven film

Less whodunit than who-didn’t-do-it, martin scorsese’s latest drama does away with the suspense of david grann’s nonfiction book about a series of murders of osage indians.

The four most dreaded words for a film critic are, “What did you think?” And never have they been more problematic than when it comes to “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s eagerly anticipated adaptation of David Grann’s 2017 book of the same name.

In that gripping, magisterial account, Grann chronicled in sickening detail how a group of Osage Indians in 1920s Oklahoma were exploited, terrorized and murdered in a series of mysterious crimes. It wasn’t a complete surprise that the culprits turned out to be the White neighbors — politicians, businessmen, friends and even loved ones — who pretended to be the Osages’ allies and protectors. Although the literal crime would eventually be solved by agents of a nascent organization called the Bureau of Investigation (later known as the FBI), what propelled “Killers of the Flower Moon” was Grann’s carefully calibrated way of widening the scope of the malfeasance, as what seemed initially to be a lively, pluralistic boom town morphed into a microcosm of American capitalistic expansion at its most ruthless, rapacious and racist.

Martin Scorsese isn’t glorifying violence. He’s reckoning with it.

Scorsese, working from a script he co-wrote with Eric Roth, does away with the suspense Grann generated so expertly in his book: After a prologue depicting a Native American funeral ritual, and a newsreel-like introduction explaining the vast oil reserves that made the Osage the wealthiest people in the country, he gets the narrative underway on a train carrying recent World War I veteran Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) to Fairfax, Okla., where he intends to seek his fortune under the guidance of his wildly successful uncle, Bill “King” Hale (Robert De Niro). Hale effectively sets up the scheme within the first 20 minutes of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” explaining to the none-too-bright Ernest that the Osage are “the finest, most beautiful people on God’s Earth” before adding that there’s money to be made in laying claim to the Indians’ rights to the oil under their tribal lands — by way of marriage, murder or any means necessary.

Scorsese’s choice to lay out the plan so bluntly deprives “Killers of the Flower Moon” of the crucial element of suspense: By the time the Bureau of Investigation’s Tom White (Jesse Plemons) shows up two hours in, the audience knows full well whodunit (as Scorsese has repeated several times in interviews, this story is a who- didn’t -do-it). What we’re left with is a dreadful, sometimes surpassingly dull taxonomy of wickedness, as the greedy, lunkheaded Ernest succumbs to Hale’s venal spell, while also falling in love with and marrying an Osage woman named Mollie.

Played with serene knowingness by Lily Gladstone, Mollie is the moral conscience of “Killers of the Flower Moon.” But she’s mostly a victim, meaning that she’s often relegated to a role of passive, if bitterly affecting, suffering. The doers here are the bad guys, much like in Scorsese pictures past, but now their impunity isn’t a matter of escapist wish fulfillment and scoundrel-y derring-do. Instead, it possesses what it’s probably had all along: the petty, plodding rhythms that befit evil at its most banal. With his mouth drawn down into a marionette frown, DiCaprio delivers one of his mumble-mouthed, anti-charismatic portrayals (more “ The Revenant ” than “ The Wolf of Wall Street ”), while De Niro embodies Hale like a down-home version of one of his New York goombahs. Scorsese lards the supporting cast with musicians like Jason Isbell and Jack White; by far the most impressive is Sturgill Simpson, who provides a welcome gleam of sly humor as one of Hale’s moonshining henchmen. (The musical score, by the late Robbie Robertson, consists mostly of a brooding bass line ostinato.)

There’s no doubt that “Killers of the Flower Moon” reflects a shift in energy that is defensible — even necessary — from an ethical point of view. Narratively, that pivot results in a film that, it must be said, feels leached of the energy and vigor viewers associate with Scorsese at his most exhilarating. In recent years, with films like “Silence” and “The Irishman,” fans have been forced to adjust their metabolisms and tamp their hunger for vicarious thrills. Like those films, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is a slower, more methodical, sometimes more boring affair. To be sure, the broad contours align with Scorsese’s most famous crime pictures: There are moments when Hale’s plans resemble the heists and hits of “Goodfellas,” and there are even a couple of shot-for-shot echoes. But here, the villainy is muted, as dirtified and desaturated as cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto’s color palette. As the brazenness and bodies pile up, the scams are no longer flights of hubristic fancy; they’re chores to be endured. (No Copacabana tracking shots or “Layla” piano solos here.)

If “Killers of the Flower Moon” isn’t as purely pleasurable to watch as Scorsese’s most canonical movies, that doesn’t mean it lacks beauty, or even audacity. Some of the film’s most transcendent moments capture the swirl of life in Osage County, from its weddings to its family meals; many feature Mollie’s mother, Lizzie (Tantoo Cardinal), whose experiences on the brink of death are represented in stunning flights of magical realism. The chaotic town of Fairfax, where people ride on horses and racecars down the main street, is a fascinating jumble of Old West and modernity, its veneer of optimism and progress queasily coexisting with the Ku Klux Klan and White-led race riots in Tulsa, just 65 miles away. As in the book, the subtext of “Killers of the Flower Moon” is what might have been, as a brief dream of tolerance and coexistence curdles into an engulfing exercise in cultural and financial theft.

As a work of history and heightened political consciousness, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is beyond reproach; it dramatizes a grievous truth — about the depravity, destruction and self-deception that undergird the American idea — that has been buried for too long, especially in movies. But that nobility of purposes raises uncomfortable questions about what makes for riveting cinema — or at least a riveting Martin Scorsese movie. At 3½ hours, the movie tests the audience’s tolerance for episodic rehearsals of bad deeds done; by the time we get to the inevitable courtroom drama (featuring a distractingly cast Brendan Fraser), the proceedings feel rote and anticlimactic.

In interviews, Scorsese has explained how he and Roth rewrote Roth’s original script for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” to give the Osage more space but also to tell their story from the inside. Despite those efforts, his point of view never gets deeper than that of an alert, caring observer. That’s despite an obvious emotional attachment to Mollie, a connection that becomes apparent in the film’s epilogue, in which the director creates a set piece that feels both emotionally distancing and movingly on point. It’s startling, self-conscious and strangely of a piece with the admirable, vexingly uneven movie that has come before: In other words, it’s totally Scorsese.

R. At area theaters, Contains violence, some grisly images and coarse language. 206 minutes.

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Movie Reviews

Scorsese centers men and their violence once again in 'killers of the flower moon'.

Justin Chang

Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon. Apple TV+ hide caption

Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon.

Martin Scorsese 's Killers of the Flower Moon mostly unfolds in the 1920s, when some of the richest people in America were members of the Osage Nation in northeast Oklahoma. Having discovered oil beneath their land years earlier, the Osage live in beautiful homes, own expensive cars and employ white servants.

As in his earlier period dramas, like The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York , Scorsese brings a highly specific bygone era to vivid life. But this story of enviable wealth is also one of exploitation. The Osage don't control their money; the U.S. government has assigned them white guardians to oversee their finances. Many Osage women are married to white men, who are clearly eyeing their wives' fortunes.

'Of course we should be here': 'Flower Moon' receives a 9-minute ovation at Cannes

The movie, adapted from David Grann 's 2017 book , is structured around one of these marriages. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a handsome, slightly feckless World War I veteran. He's come to Oklahoma to live with his uncle, William K. Hale, a wealthy cattle rancher and beloved community pillar played by Robert De Niro. Soon Ernest finds work as a driver for Mollie Kyle, a quietly steely Osage woman played by Lily Gladstone, whom you may recognize from the series Reservation Dogs and movies like Certain Women .

Ernest is a flirt, and while she initially resists his advances, Mollie eventually falls for him. They marry in a visually stunning wedding sequence that shows the panoramic sweep of Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography and the exquisite detail of Jacqueline West's costumes. But even as they settle down and start a family, Mollie begins to lose hers. Her mother and sister succumb to a mysterious illness. Another sister is found shot to death in the woods. Many more Osage victims turn up, suggesting an intricate criminal conspiracy at work.

Largely Forgotten Osage Murders Reveal A Conspiracy Against Wealthy Native Americans

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Grann's book unraveled that conspiracy gradually, through the eyes of Tom White, a dogged investigator for the FBI; he's played here, very well, by Jesse Plemons. But the movie diminishes his role considerably and reveals what's going on pretty much from the start: White men are systematically murdering the Osage for their headrights, their legal claims to this oil-rich land.

What's so unsettling is not just the ruthlessness but the patience of this scheme; whoever's plotting these chess moves, arranging marriages, devising murders and controlling who inherits headrights, is playing a very long and elaborate game. Killers of the Flower Moon is very long itself at three-and-a-half hours, but it's also continually gripping; Scorsese and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker are masters of the slow burn.

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Blood, oil, and the osage nation: the battle over headrights.

Whatever's going on, it's clear that De Niro's Hale is at the center of the mystery — not just because of the cunning twinkle in his eye, but also because he bears the darkly iconic weight of the actor's past roles in GoodFellas , Cape Fear, The Irishman and other Scorsese dramas.

DiCaprio, also a Scorsese veteran, is equally good as Hale's gullible lackey, who gets drawn into this cold-blooded plot. When Mollie falls very ill, a chill runs through the entire picture: Could Ernest really be killing the mother of his children, a woman he genuinely seems to love?

Mollie herself doesn't know what to think. Gladstone's captivating performance makes you feel her turmoil, as well as her unrelenting grief as her family members keep dying.

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Scorsese wants to honor those victims, and to show how they fit into the long, brutal history of Native American displacement and death. After spending decades exploring America's mean streets, he's addressing the country's original sin. Much of the pre-release buzz has focused on the care that he took, working with Osage consultants to present an authentic depiction of Indigenous life. Even so, some have asked whether a white man should be telling this story — a question that Scorsese seems to acknowledge in one powerfully self-implicating scene.

To my eyes, the movie does have a framing problem, but it's mainly because of its jumble of perspectives. Scorsese gives just enough attention to Mollie and the other Osage characters that I wish he'd centered them even more. But the movie's true interest seems to lie elsewhere. Killers of the Flower Moon may be a fresh departure for Scorsese, but it also finds him on perhaps too-familiar terrain, transfixed as ever by the violence that men do and the trauma that they leave behind.

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‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’ Review: Scorsese, De Niro, DiCaprio Take On Powerful And Dark Epic Of Love, Deception, Murder And Greed Set Against The Osage Nation – Cannes Film Festival

By Pete Hammond

Pete Hammond

Awards Columnist/Chief Film Critic

Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio & Robert De Niro On How They Found The Emotional Handle For Their Cannes Epic ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’

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Grann is a journalist-turned-bestselling author whose works seem tailor-made for the movies. His The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon gave director James Gray the rip-roaring material to make what I think is still his finest film — also not one attempting to shoot the book as it were, but to get to the heart of it. That is what Scorsese has done in spades with Killers of the Flower Moon , Grann’s best-known work to date, centering it not on the Texas Ranger-turned-FBI agent Tom White who became the “white savior” for the Osage community when he cracked the case in 1923, but rather on the suspects involved in a scheme to take back what the white man believed was naturally theirs. It was diabolical, no less so because its architect convinced those involved that it was entirely legal .

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The movie really is about greed in that way, the lengths we may go to get rich. It is also about the conundrum of Native Americans’ treatment by the white man — something Hollywood has drilled into our subconscious since movies began. Scorsese, with an authentic cast in which Native Americans have more than 40 speaking parts (not to mention countless extras), changes things up on an epic scale — everything about this movie is big — and attempts to bury the transgressions of Hollywood’s shaky past in telling these kinds of stories. Killers of the Flower Moon is a landmark motion picture achievement, if only for the care and handling of how it tells the story of the Osage Nation.

At its heart though is a love story, or so we are meant to believe, that starts with the arrival of a wounded World War I veteran Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), who comes back to this Oklahoma town to work for his uncle, William Hale ( Robert De Niro ), a kind of titular civic-minded figure well-liked by the Osage he has convinced are his good friends, people whose best interests he is looking out for. Burkhart really is a kind of aimless and happy-go-lucky guy, certainly impressionable enough to be roped into Hale’s ultimately evil scheme of getting a rich Osage woman to marry him, then kill off her family and finally her — slow poison is a good method — to inherit her money and land. If this can happen enough, Hale believes, the Osage people will be pushed out and/or killed off. Enter Mollie Kyke (Lily Gladstone), an attractive and smart Osage woman who does seem smitten by Ernest’s natural charm even though she points out he probably “likes money,” but he genuinely seems to grow to love her, and she him. They get married, have kids, but a mysterious series of deaths are occurring in the community and soon in Mollie’s own family as well, including her sisters and mother. Getting wind of this, FBI agent White ( Jesse Plemons ) turns up to investigate. Things heat up as Mollie herself becomes sick.

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What Scorsese does not seem interested in doing is refocusing the story on this particular investigation which in real-life led to a trial (John Lithgow and Brendan Fraser turn up as opposing lawyers), or in shaping this into any kind of murder mystery. Early on we know damn well who is responsible and why it is happening. Scorsese even incorporates a killing montage just to drive the point home. In other words, this is not a procedural or about “the birth of the FBI” as Grann’s own title insinuates (James Stewart already made that movie — it is called The FBI Story ) . 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.

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DiCaprio is superb here, and it is a tricky role because he is doing something very bad, getting himself in deeper but also must convince us there is more there than meets the eye. De Niro is deliciously slippery here, kind of a Donald Trump-like figure who believes he is helping the people who seem to revere him, but of course is really just exploiting them while keeping a smile on his face. Gladstone is just terrific, playing Mollie on several levels and making us believe every beat of this performance. Her casting here is perfect. Although his role is truncated from what it is in the book, Plemons is right on the money, almost an amusing, shrewd, Colombo-like figure who is trying to get the answers. The picture was already alive before he shows up, but it gets even more so when he does. A large group of Native American actors make up so much of the outstanding supporting cast including veteran Tantoo Cardinal as Lizzie Q, Mollie’s mother; as well as the trio of Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, and Jillian Dion (especially good) as her sisters.

Production-wise the film looks great with sharp contributions from cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto capturing that vast landscape of Oklahoma with awe-inspiring camera work; the production design of Jack Fisk; costumes of Jacqueline West; and a Scorsese favorite Robbie Robertson with the score. Bradley Thomas, Daniel Lupi, Dan Friedkin and Scorsese produced. Whatever the reported $200 million budget, it is all on the screen in the kind of big-screen epic tale Hollywood has been shying away from. Apple stepped up to ensure Scorsese’s vision and this could be a game-changer in terms of theatrical distribution and streaming coming together.

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 it a movie that could not come at a better time.

Parmount Pictures will open Killers of the Flower Moon in theaters limited on October 6 and wide on October 20. It will stream on a later unspecified date on Apple TV+.

Title: Killers of the Flower Moon Festival: Cannes (Out of Competition) Distributor: Apple Original Films/Paramount Pictures U.S. release date: October 6, 2023 Director: Martin Scorsese Screenplay: Martin Scorsese, Eric Roth Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, William Belleau, Louis Cancelmi, Tatanka Means, Michael Abbott Jr.,Pat Healy, Scott Shepherd, Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson Running time: 3 hr 26 min

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Killers of the flower moon, common sense media reviewers.

Masterful American epic about greed, violence, and racism.

Killers of the Flower Moon Movie Poster: Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) looks serious while Mollie (Lily Gladstone) rests her head against his chest, her eyes closed

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Has plenty to say about greed and racism in the wa

It's hard to come out the other side of this compl

Though written and directed by White men, and told

Guns and shooting. Many deaths, both violently and

Characters kiss passionately. Sex-related dialogue

Uses of "f--k," "horses--t," "bulls--t," "s--t," "

A staged radio play within the film heavily promot

Characters drink frequently and are sometimes seen

Positive Messages

Has plenty to say about greed and racism in the way it portrays White characters taking advantage of Native Americans. It's essentially a complex story of violence and manipulation, with little regard for humanity or compassion.

Positive Role Models

It's hard to come out the other side of this complex story with any empathy for anyone except the victims. Even Ernest falls prey to suggestions by others and does evil deeds, and Mollie is mainly a victim.

Diverse Representations

Though written and directed by White men, and told through the point of view of White men, the movie strongly critiques the greedy White lead characters, who lie to, rob from, and murder Osage characters to steal their wealth. Viewers' sympathies are clearly with the movie's Osage characters, who are portrayed thoughtfully and with realistically human flaws (plus accurate representation of their language) and are largely played authentically by actors who identify as Native, including Tantoo Cardinal, Cara Jade Myers, Janae Colins, and more. Co-star Lily Gladstone was raised on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Occasional anti-Native American, racist dialogue isn't condoned by the movie. Ku Klux Klan members are shown during a parade. Women are largely portrayed as wives, homemakers, and/or mothers; behind closed doors, they're shown to be smart and/or self-aware, talking about their wants, needs, destinies. But Gladstone's character spends a lot of the movie as a victim; other women die off rather quickly.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Guns and shooting. Many deaths, both violently and from illness. Gory dead bodies covered in scratches, bruises, wounds, etc. A woman's dead body is lifted, the back of her head flopping loose. Severed fingers. During an autopsy, doctors saw off the top of a woman's skull. Young mother is suddenly shot; blood spatter, bleeding through her dress, and her baby is taken. Person shot through back of head, with spatter. House blown up with explosives; people die inside. Windows blown out by explosion. Character having a seizure foams at the mouth. Person is grabbed, a bag is pulled over his head; he's punched viciously. Characters are brutally beaten up. Slapping. Car crash. Ranch on fire. Characters held up, robbed. Dead dog on sidewalk. Grave robbers dig up graves to steal valuables. Character whacked on bottom. Disturbing old footage of race riots. A safe is blown up. Discussion of death by suicide. Doctors knowingly prescribe poisonous medicines to Native Americans. Subtle suggestions of sexual threat, forced sexual encounters.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Characters kiss passionately. Sex-related dialogue.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Uses of "f--k," "horses--t," "bulls--t," "s--t," "goddamn," "bitch," "son of a bitch," "damn," "nee-gra" (slangy version of the "N" word), "dumbbell." Native people are called "Red" by White characters, including in a way that objectifies Native women.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

A staged radio play within the film heavily promotes Lucky Strike.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters drink frequently and are sometimes seen drunk. A woman says, "I'm still drunk from last night!" Social drinking. Regular cigarette smoking. Main character drinks from flask. Secondary characters are moonshine runners. Characters drink moonshine. Reference to selling cocaine.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Killers of the Flower Moon is a powerful, epic crime drama by director Martin Scorsese that stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro . It's based on the true story of Osage Nation people who become wealthy after discovering oil -- and the unscrupulous White people who then try to take it from them. Violence is frequent and can be intense: Expect guns and shooting, many deaths (both violently and from illness), gory dead bodies, blood spatters, explosions, abductions, beatings, suggestions of sexual threat, and more. There's also a lot of racist behavior, including White doctors giving poison to Native American characters in the guise of medicine. There's frequent drinking (whiskey and moonshine), regular cigarette smoking, and a reference to cocaine. Language includes several uses of "f--k," "s--t," "goddamn," and "bitch," plus "nee-gra" (a version of the "N" word). There's passionate kissing and some sex-related dialogue. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

Parents say (7)
Kids say (8)

Based on 7 parent reviews

A Powerful Reckoning With History

What's the story.

In KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, it's early in the 20th century in the United States, and the people of the Osage Nation discover oil on their land. They immediately become extraordinarily wealthy, leading unscrupulous White people to begin scheming about ways to get the money for themselves -- including marrying into Osage families. Meanwhile, Ernest Burkhart ( Leonardo DiCaprio ) comes home from war and goes to work as a driver for his wealthy cattle-rancher uncle, William "King" Hale ( Robert De Niro ). He gives Mollie ( Lily Gladstone ), an Osage woman, a ride and immediately becomes attracted to her. They eventually marry for love, but King sees an opportunity. If certain members of Mollie's family were to suddenly pass away, then the oil rights would revert to the easily manipulated Ernest. Thus begins a tapestry of violent deaths, followed by more deaths to cover up the earlier deaths, until enough becomes enough, and Mollie travels to Washington, D.C., to bring the matter to the president.

Is It Any Good?

Martin Scorsese 's masterful movie is a fatalistic American epic of greed and violence, without any false idealism, as well as a brutal true-crime story. Whereas Scorsese's last outing, The Irishman , had a more reflective mood, Killers of the Flower Moon -- which has the breadth and depth of The Godfather -- finds him back in fighting shape, though the race-based murders will test a viewer's tolerance level for watching human atrocities take place on screen.

Scorsese casts his two favorite actors (who, combined, have appeared in 15 of the director's 26 feature films) together for the first time. De Niro and DiCaprio bring out the best (or worst?) in each other as they dive into their not-so-nice characters. Scorsese zips through the complex plot -- taken from the nonfiction book by David Grann -- like a bullet, building roadblocks and raising the stakes so neatly and cleverly that the movie's three-and-a-half-hour runtime never feels padded or inflated. Moreover, Killers of the Flower Moon works as a reevaluation of Kevin Costner 's Dances with Wolves , which required a noble White hero to tell its positive tale of Native Americans. In contrast, Scorsese's movie shows White people as greedy, merciless, and racist, while the Osage are taken advantage of. True, it's another movie about Native peoples told from the perspective of White men. But this is a modern epic that uses more cultural sensitivity than we've seen in the past, inviting viewers to remember and reckon with the ugly legacy of what happened to the Osage peoples and how American greed continues to undermine Indigenous peoples today.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Killers of the Flower Moon 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it nauseating? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

How does the movie depict racism ? What are some obvious examples, and which are more subtle? Are characters portrayed three-dimensionally, or are stereotypes used?

How did you feel about Ernest? Is he truly in love with his wife? Is he a bad person? Why does he do the things he does?

How are alcohol and cigarettes portrayed? Are they glamorized? Are there consequences? Why does that matter?

Movie Details

In theaters : October 20, 2023
On DVD or streaming : December 5, 2023
Cast : Leonardo DiCaprio , Robert De Niro , Lily Gladstone
Director : Martin Scorsese
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Indigenous actors
Studios : Apple TV+ , Paramount Pictures
Genre : Drama
Topics : History
Run time : 206 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : violence, some grisly images, and language
Award : Golden Globe
Last updated : March 16, 2024

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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DVD & Streaming

Killers of the Flower Moon

Biography/History , Crime , Drama

Content Caution

In Theaters

October 20, 2023
Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart; Robert De Niro as William “King” Hale; Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart; Jesse Plemons as Tom White; Tantoo Cardinal as Lizzie Q; John Lithgow as Prosecutor Leaward; Brendan Fraser as W. S. Hamilton; Cara Jade Myers as Anna Brown; JaNae Collins as Reta; Jillian Dion as Minnie; Jason Isbell as Bill Smith; William Belleau as Henry Roan; Louis Cancelmi as Kelsie Morrison; Scott Shepherd as Bryan Burkhart

Home Release Date

November 3, 2023
Martin Scorsese

Distributor

Paramount Pictures; Apple TV+

Movie Review

Oklahoma’s earth is dark, rich. Corn, cotton and wheat all grow well here. Lush native grasses offer livestock plenty of grazing.

And the wildflowers! The people of the Osage Nation marveled at their springtime beauty, blooming during what they called the Flower Moon.

But in the 1920s, nothing in Oklahoma grew as thick, as easily, as greed.

The oil under the earth is dark, rich. Those new automobiles thirst for it. And people do, too. But in this northern corner of Oklahoma, that dirty, dark liquid belongs to the Osage—a people pushed to this territory when no one else wanted it. They bought their reservation outright from the government in 1872—a rarity, to be sure. As such, they kept the land’s mineral rights.

Two decades later, oil gurgled up through the dirt. And just like that, the Osage people became the richest people, per capita, on the planet.

But just as pollen draws bees, wealth draws thieves, charlatans and worse.

Ernest Burkhart arrives in Fairfax, Oklahoma, shortly after World War I. He needs a job. And his uncle, William “King” Hale, says he might have one. Admittedly, Ernest can’t do much: His gut keeps Ernest from heavy labor, and the guy’s not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. But he can drive a car. Yes, that he can do.

And do he does. He serves as a cabbie to the Osage—taking them to and from town, waiting while they do their shopping. But he especially loves driving a woman named Mollie around. Quiet Mollie. Pretty Mollie. Rich Mollie.

That suits King Hale fine, just fine. In fact, he’d like Ernest to get closer yet. Why, he’d love to see them get married, he would. Love is such a beautiful thing. And he thinks the world of Mollie.

‘Course, it doesn’t hurt in King’s calculus that Mollie’s whole family, her mother and three sisters, are filthy rich in oil. One of those sisters has been feeling a bit poorly lately. She might not be long for this world. Mollie’s mother, Lizzie Q, is old and frail. Soon, Mollie’s family might be smaller—and their share of the fortune larger.

And let’s be honest, strange things have been happening around Fairfax. The Osage keep dying young. No one knows why—or, at least, so they say. Could be that Mollie’s sisters might die, too? One’s been known to drink heavily. She carries a gun, too. She’s a ticking time bomb, that one. And the other? Well, you know what they say: Accidents happen.

And Mollie? She suffers from diabetes. And women don’t live long in these parts with diabetes.

And then, when—er, if —all sisters should tragically pass on, that whole fortune might fall right in Ernest’s lap. And that lap is just one step removed from King’s own coffers.

That suits King Hale fine. Just fine.

Positive Elements

Killers of the Flower Moon is based on a true and tragic chapter in American history. It involved the murders and unexplained deaths of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Osage Native Americans in the 1920s. Accordingly, moviegoers meet plenty of nasty, duplicitous characters here. But Osage County has its share of good folks, too.

One of them is, most certainly, Mollie. She clearly loves her family and serves as a dutiful (if somewhat overlooked) daughter to her mother, Lizzie Q. She cares for Lizzie in her last sickness and does what she can to help her other sisters, too. And when she marries Ernest, she seems to be a good, fair, mother to their kids.

But she’s as concerned about these unexplained deaths as anyone, and she’s determined to put them to a stop. She, along with other Osage, sends a representative to Washington, D.C., to find official governmental help. She hires a private investigator. And when both of those people mysteriously disappear, she goes to Washington herself—despite being debilitatingly ill.

We see other people, both Osage and white, attempt to solve these murders or to stand up to the suspected perpetrators. And eventually, help does come down from Washington: Tom White, who introduces himself as an agent for the newly formed Federal Bureau of Investigation.

At first, White comes across as a deferential, ineffective investigator—all too willing to back down and come back at a time more convenient for his prime suspects. But as the film goes on, White’s strategy becomes more clear: He acts as public face of the investigation while the real detecting is done by undercover operators.

Spiritual Elements

The spiritual atmosphere in Killers of the Flower Moon comes in layers.

We see a lot of Osage ceremonies. Marriages, burials, christenings and celebrations all come with an indigenous twang. A pipe is buried in a sad ceremony, representing the passing of the Osage way of life. Apples are left on the lids of coffins, and little children sometimes are made to walk across them. Osage leaders, and others, occasionally reference “Wah-Kon-Tah,” the Osage creator spirit.

But many Osage who participate in these ceremonies also consider themselves Christian. Leaders who invoked Wah-Kon-Tah openly talk about the Lord and heaven as well, suggesting that the Osage consider the two to be one and the same. Funerals and christenings, while incorporating some specifically Osage rituals, appear to be largely rooted in the Christian faith (with priests presiding over the ceremony). And the movie suggests that at least during this period of time, Osage traditional beliefs have blended with Christian faith.

The real Mollie Burkhart was said to have been a devout Catholic, and her faith is reflected in the movie. When Ernest tells her that he’s a Christian, she notes that she’s not seen him in church. When he attends with her, she snickers a bit when he stands as everyone else bends to kneel. And as the story grows darker, Mollie chooses to confess one of her most deeply held fears and suspicions to her Catholic priest. But when Ernest joins her for dinner one night and a huge storm rages through, Mollie demands that the two of them remain quiet during the storm—a deluge that she believes carries special power.

King Hale certainly wants people to think he’s a devoted Christian. He tells Ernest that the Osage are the best people on “God’s green Earth.” He references Bible verses and stories frequently, and he sometimes breaks into spontaneous prayer. But he’s been known to invoke Wah-Kon-Tah as well—largely to show his solidarity with and support of the Osage people.

Osage women see visions of owls, which they interpret as ill omens for themselves and for their people. We hear about dreams and what they might mean—including one where Mollie worries about a relative not being able to go into the afterlife because her body didn’t have a face. A woman—dying or dead—crosses over into the afterlife, guided by ancestors and/or loved ones.

Sexual Content

When Ernest first arrives, King quizzes him about his sexual experiences and inclinations. He asks him whether he came back from World War I with any “diseases” (his meaning crudely obvious through context) and whether he likes women. When Ernest says he does, King asks, “red women?” Ernest says he likes women of all colors (including blue) and of all shapes and sizes. “I’m greedy,” he adds.

Soon (with a bit of encouragement from King), Ernest develops a special attraction to Mollie. The two grow closer, both romantically and physically. They make out furiously in a truck (with Ernest’s hand wedged against Mollie’s chest through her garments) when Ernest asks Mollie to marry him. We see the couple making out elsewhere—sometimes revealing a bit of skin but nothing critical. When Mollie pulls Ernest on top of her in bed, Ernest jokes that Mollie’s trying to wake the children.

Anna, Mollie’s provocative sister, believes that she’s the girlfriend of Bryan Burkhart, Ernest’s older brother (and a close King confidante). In a public setting, Bryan accuses her of being with other men and shrugs off the idea they were involved at all. (Anna crudely insists otherwise.) When Bryan then makes some lewd moves on a nearby maid—including coming close and holding her around the middle—Anna grows angry and threatens to kill them both.

[ Spoiler Warning ] When Anna is found dead later, doctors discover that she was pregnant, and King suggests that it might be his child.

A scene takes place in what seems to be a saloon and brothel, with a man clutching the exposed thigh of a woman at a table.

Violent Content

A woman is found dead—the body having been left to the elements for several days. We don’t see much of the corpse, but we do hear as doctors saw open the victim’s skull, then stick something into the brain to, apparently, find the bullet lodged there. We later see the actual murder from a distance—done via revolver close to the head. We’re told that the body was later exhumed, perhaps flayed and finally cut into bits.

An explosion rips through a family home. One woman is found lying dead; when would-be rescuers lift the body, the back of her skull flaps open. A survivor of the blast screams for someone to shoot him. (We only see part of him, bloodied and trapped under debris.) Someone at the site steps on the part of a disembodied hand. He’s told that it likely belongs to the maid; parts of her body have been retrieved all evening.

We see other, less gruesome murders and killings. Someone is instructed to make one murder look like a suicide; but that plan is foiled when the victim is shot in the back of the head, and the killer takes the gun with him. A young mother is shot on a well-manicured front lawn, shortly after putting a baby in a buggy. The killer then spirits the baby back inside as the woman’s body is left to bleed on the lawn. (Coroners later determined the death to be a suicide.)

Would-be robbers are thwarted by a store owner, who shoots the first man to break in with a shotgun. (We see the bloodied body.) Another man, his head already bleeding, drives his car into a tree. (A friend of his tells authorities that an “angel” took him.)

Someone else gets gunned down. A body is found in a pool of muddy water or oil. A man drinks poisoned liquor, apparently, and jerks on the floor as he dies, foaming at the mouth. Several people die from mysterious diseases, and we see their bodies prepped for burial. Two people are beaten to death. (We see parts of the attacks and the bodies thereafter.)

People contract other people to kill. Threats are made. A young girl dies from disease, and we see her dead body. People fight at a train station. Part of a ranch burns. Someone threatens self-harm, and we hear that this individual tried to commit suicide earlier.

Crude or Profane Language

One or two uses of the f-word and about a half-dozen s-words. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “d–n” and “h—.” God’s name is abused about a dozen times, the majority of those misuses with the word “d–n.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

While the movie takes place during Prohibition, alcohol still flows freely in this corner of the United States. Anna, Mollie’s sister, has a drinking problem. (And the film suggests that her habit was encouraged by King.) We see her often tipsy or drunk. When Mollie reprimands her for already being snockered one morning, Anna brags that she’s never been to bed.

Another Osage, Henry, has his own dependence on alcohol encouraged. Prone to despondency, he demands that someone either give him booze or give him a gun (so he, presumably, can take his own life). In the end, a man introduces Henry to a particularly potent form of moonshine. The two drink together frequently before their relationship is, shall we say, terminated.

We see where that moonshine is made, and are introduced to those who make it. Later, that alcohol still is found completely torn apart.

Over dinner during their short courtship, Mollie asks Ernest whether he likes whiskey. He sorely does, Ernest says, and she promises him that the whiskey she has is top-shelf stuff. The two drink it then and elsewhere. King and Ernest also drink together.

Mollie, Ernest and others smoke cigarettes. King smokes the occasional cigar.

[ Spoiler Warning ] Mollie receives what are called insulin injections, but they only seem to make her sicker. As her search for the Osage killers continues, Ernest is asked to mix another substance into the insulin, which (he’s told) will just “calm her down.” Ernest, either suspicious or curious, dumps some of the substance into his own whiskey and drinks it down.

Other Negative Elements

Toward the end of Mollie’s sickness, she often clutches a pot in bed, apparently to vomit into.

While the Osage may be rich, they’re subjected to a great deal of prejudice and bigotry—and in a number of different shades. Some folks are semi-openly hostile to the Native Americans, robbing them while wearing sacks of their heads and hurling derogatory slurs in their direction.

But a lot of the abuse is more veiled. Some people seem to think that the Osages’ wealth is an aberration, and that the oil will inevitably make its way into the hands of white Americans, whom they believe are the more deserving race. Certainly, the white power structure around Osage county turns a disturbingly blind eye to the murders and injustices committed there, and the federal government also seems slow to respond.

As far as enumerating all the many underhanded tricks and schemes in play … well, we’d likely run out of room.

People rob graves and gamble with the stolen loot. A Ku Klux Klan troop marches openly through Fairfax’s main street.

Killers of the Flower Moon is, as mentioned, based on a 2017 non-fiction book by journalist David Grann, which unpacked a grim chapter of American history—the wrongs of which were only partly addressed. At least 60 Osage Native Americans were killed between 1918 and 1931 in Osage County, with other suspicious deaths perhaps ballooning that total into the hundreds. Many of the murders were never solved.

Those tragic, complex underpinnings make for a rather grim movie. We’re subjected to so many jarring deaths and, sometimes, wince-worthy gore. Stretching over three-and-a-half hours, Killers of the Flower Moon can be a hard film to take in. It’s not really slow, and it’s never really boring. But it can feel like an Oklahoma storm, loud and terrible, where we’re trapped inside.

And yet, Killers of the Flower Moon also showcases director Martin Scorsese’s late-career movie mastery—and illustrates some perhaps unexpected restraint.

Scorsese’s films, from Taxi Driver to Goodfellas to The Wolf of Wall Street , are among cinema’s most lauded works—but they’re among the most problematic, too. Scorsese’s storytelling is invariably riveting but often outrageously bloody, foul and, in the case of Wolf , flat-out gratuitous.

And yet for Scorsese, even that gratuity comes with a message. In that case, the director insists that all that extreme content was necessary to tell what he considered to be a cautionary tale.

In Killers of the Flower Moon , Scorsese gives us another cautionary tale, but without the gratuity. Yes, he’s aided by the movie’s time setting, when the f-word wasn’t hurled like pebbles on a playground. Yes, the movie is still rated R, and with reason. Killers mangle bodies and snuff out lives with barely a backward glance.

But those moments of grotesquery remind us of the dehumanizing racism at play here: These aren’t murders , the killers seem to think. Just messy jobs . Even as King Hale praises the Osage people as being the “best on God’s green Earth,” he schemes and plots and, without lifting a finger, kills to pad his own portfolio. God and the good ol’ boys form convenient cover for the worst of crimes.

On the other side, we’re given the quiet, determined dignity of Mollie Burkhart—a woman of deeper faith and stronger conviction. And in the middle wavers her husband, Ernest.

In a telling scene, Ernest cackles about how much he loves money—loves it almost as much as his wife. And therein lies the moral struggle of Killers of the Flower Moon : the pull and power of greed that can tear you away from what you truly should love, what you truly should value.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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What to Know About ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’: A Guide to the Osage Murders

Martin Scorsese’s epic traces a real plot by white men to kill dozens of Native Americans who held oil rights in 1920s Oklahoma. Here is the back story.

Four women lounge outdoors on a blanket. They’re wrapped in separate blankets and three of them have fans in their hands.

By Sarah Bahr

In the 1920s, at least 60 Osage people were murdered or went missing in Oklahoma. Their white killers often married the victims before dispatching them. With shares of the tribe’s immense oil profits at stake, the scheme made them rich.

Until one of them shot Anna Brown in the back of the head in May 1921 and dumped her body in a ravine, a killing so brutal that a recently formed organization of undercover officers, the precursor to the F.B.I., took notice. The agency conducted a sprawling investigation that culminated in the arrests of three of Brown’s relatives, including her brother-in-law, Ernest Burkhart, bringing an end to what the Osage called the Reign of Terror.

These events are the subject of Martin Scorsese’s new three-and-a-half-hour epic, “ Killers of the Flower Moon ,” which arrives in theaters on Friday. Based on David Grann’s nonfiction book of the same name, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Burkhart; Lily Gladstone as Mollie Kyle, the wealthy Osage woman he marries; and Robert De Niro as Burkhart’s scheming uncle, William King Hale, who is responsible for the whole operation.

Unlike Grann’s book, which also chronicles the birth of the F.B.I., Scorsese’s film focuses on the effects of the murders in the Osage community. Here is what you need to know about the real people and events dramatized in the film.

Who are the Osage?

The Osage once lived across much of the central United States. In the early 1870s, the U.S. government forced them to leave their land in Kansas and move to a rocky, presumably worthless reservation in northeastern Oklahoma.

But the Osage were one of the few American Indian nations to buy their own reservation — using the proceeds from the sale of their Kansas lands to white settlers — meaning they retained sovereignty and more rights to their Oklahoma property.

How did they become so wealthy?

Their new reservation turned out to be ill-suited for farming but rich in oil.

After large deposits were discovered in 1894, the Osage, who retained communal mineral rights, came into enormous wealth: Prospectors had to pay the tribe for leases to extract the oil, as well as royalties on the profits. In 1923 alone, the Osage earned $30 million in royalties, the equivalent of roughly $540 million today.

By the 1920s, many of the Osage lived in mansions and had chauffeured cars. There was even a Tiffany’s counter at the local trading post.

Who was William King Hale?

Hale, the self-proclaimed “King of the Osage Hills,” was a well-connected and politically influential white cattle rancher who appeared to be a staunch ally of the Osage, from whom he bought and leased thousands of acres. He befriended and traded with them, building up power and prestige through gifts and favors. Privately, though, he resented their enormous wealth and began plotting with other white men to get their hands on it.

Why did Hale and his confederates want to kill the Osage?

Every one of the 2,229 members on the Osage tribal rolls in 1907 was entitled to an equal share of the oil royalties, a dispensation known as a headright. These payments could amount to as much as $13,000 per year per person, or the equivalent of $232,000 today. A family of four would have received the equivalent of about $928,000 a year.

In 1921, the U.S. government passed a law — purportedly to help the Osage manage their wealth — that deemed a vast majority “incompetent” to handle more than a limited sum of money and required their payments to be funneled through court-appointed guardians. These people, who were white lawyers and businessmen, more often than not shortchanged their wards.

So why not simply buy or extort a headright rather than kill? There was a legal wrinkle: Headrights could not be bought or sold, only inherited. Non-Osage men would marry into families with headrights and then sometimes murder entire families, including their own wives, to ensure they would end up in possession of one or more shares.

Who was Mollie Burkhart?

Mollie Kyle was a single woman from a wealthy Osage family, which made her a target. In 1917, Ernest Burkhart, the handsome 20-something nephew of William Hale, married her at the urging of his uncle, who had designs on her and her family’s headrights.

A few years after they were married, members of Mollie’s family began dying in suspicious ways. First, in 1918, a sister, Minnie Smith, died of what doctors called a “peculiar wasting illness” (probably poisoning). Then, in 1921, another sister, Anna Brown, was shot in the back of the head and dumped in a ravine, a brutal contract killing orchestrated by Hale that kicked off the Reign of Terror. Over the next two years, Mollie’s mother, Lizzie Q, and her final surviving sister, Rita Smith, also died in a probable poisoning and a home explosion, respectively. With each death, Mollie — and therefore Ernest — inherited additional headrights.

There was another reason Mollie Burkhart was a perfect candidate for Hale’s scheme: She was diabetic, so a premature death would be easy to attribute to her illness at a time when insulin was not widely available. Corrupt doctors in Hale’s control began injecting her with poison under the guise of administering an experimental new treatment. (She recovered after moving away and getting treatment at a hospital.)

Why did it take so long for the federal government to intervene?

The Osage Tribal Council suspected Hale early on, but it couldn’t get anyone to testify against him: Hale had bribed or threatened many witnesses into silence. Local authorities declined to investigate or, in the case of the coroner, falsified documents. Hale also covered his tracks, participating in the murder investigations and even offering rewards for leads.

But in 1923, after the death toll had risen to more than two dozen, the council issued a resolution asking the federal government to look into the matter. That April, J. Edgar Hoover assigned agents from the Bureau of Investigation to the case. (It would later be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation.)

Posing as a cattle buyer, an insurance salesman, a medicine man and an oil prospector — a subplot that didn’t make it into the film — four undercover agents from the bureau, led by Tom White (played by Jesse Plemons), lived among the Osage for two years and gained their trust. Eventually, people began speaking out against Hale.

Did Hale ever confess?

After he and Ernest Burkhart were arrested in 1926 for the murders of Mollie’s sister Rita and her husband, Bill, the killings stopped. Hale, who by then had become a millionaire through a combination of insurance fraud and unfair trade with the Osage people, maintained his innocence, but Burkhart confessed and described his uncle’s role in the scheme. Burkhart also disclosed that at Hale’s request, he had personally hired the man responsible for murdering one of the Osage victims. (Read a 1926 New York Times report on the case here .)

In 1929, Hale was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Henry Roan, Mollie’s cousin. Hale spent the next 18 years in prison before being paroled in 1947, when he went to work as a cowboy in Montana. He retired to Arizona and died in 1962. He never apologized or admitted to his actions. Burkhart was sentenced to life in prison in state court, paroled in 1937 and had it revoked in 1941 after robbing his former sister-in-law, Lillie Morrell Burkhart. He was paroled again in 1959 and pardoned in 1966.

Do the Osage still receive headright payments today?

Yes, and they can still be lucrative, though not as lucrative as during the oil boom in the 1920s. Part of their value comes from their relative scarcity: Though the tribe has roughly doubled in size since 1907, the number of headrights is still fixed at 2,229, meaning a recipient must have inherited or been willed an original share. Today, a headright can be worth thousands of dollars per year .

Around 25 percent of payments go to nontribal members, including non-Indians, churches, community organizations and even, in one case, a defunct care home , as Bloomberg reported.

What does the film’s title mean?

During May in the Oklahoma hills, blooming flowers die when taller plants crowd them out, so the Osage refer to that month as “the time of the flower-killing moon.” The murder of Anna Brown took place in May 1921, so the title also serves as a metaphor for what happened to the Osage.

Sarah Bahr is a senior staff editor at The Times. She has reported on a range of topics, most often theater, film and television, while writing for the Culture, Styles and National desks. More about Sarah Bahr

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Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon

‘Hollywood doesn’t change overnight’: Indigenous viewers on Killers of the Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese’s epic adaptation of David Grann’s nonfiction book has received mixed notices from Native viewers, praising its existence yet with vital caveats

I t boasts Hollywood royalty such as Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio , was backed to the tune of $200m by tech behemoth Apple and has earned the kind of reviews that generate Oscar buzz.

But Killers of the Flower Moon , a western true-crime thriller about the systematic killing of Osage Nation members for their oil-rich land in the 1920s, is generating mixed feelings and opinions among Native American communities.

Devery Jacobs, an Indigenous actor who played Elora in the TV drama Reservation Dogs, posted on social media X , formerly known as Twitter: “Being Native, watching this movie was fucking hellfire. Imagine the worst atrocities committed against (your) ancestors, then having to sit (through) a movie explicitly filled with them, with the only respite being 30 minute long scenes of murderous white guys talking about/planning the killings.”

The film explores the relationship between Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a member of the Osage nation, and Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), a first world war veteran who comes to work for his corrupt uncle (De Niro). The screenplay is adapted from David Grann’s 2017 bestselling nonfiction book of the same title by Scorsese and Eric Roth.

Scorsese, 80, who directed the audacious 206-minute epic, has said the original script, which was told from the perspective of white FBI agents investigating the Osage murders, was overhauled to tell a story closer to the Osage Nation’s perspective . He filmed in Oklahoma and cast Osage and other Indigenous actors. The Osages were involved at every level of production including costumes, sets and the depiction of customs and language.

But Native American viewers interviewed by the Guardian offer a complex set of responses, both celebrating and critiquing Killers of the Flower Moon . They praise the movie’s effort to highlight Osage history with Indigenous actors in prominent roles but express reservations about its graphic violence and lack of historical context, foregrounding of white characters and lack of an Indigenous screenwriter or director.

Elizabeth Rule , a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and assistant professor at American University in Washington, says: “It was a very difficult film for me personally to watch as a Native viewer. I see that coming through as one of the dominant critiques and that absolutely holds true for me and my experience as well.

“But just because it was challenging to watch doesn’t mean that it isn’t important to witness and bear witness to these devastating stories. We have to remember that these were depictions of true, brutal premeditated murders of Indigenous people and so we should get upset and feel deeply uncomfortable taking in these scenes of violence and especially all the more so because they reflect a true history.

“In this way I do see the value of the film coming from its ability to raise awareness, especially among non-Native viewers, about the violence that our communities face historically and today.”

Indigenous actor Gladstone has been described as “ the breakout star ” of Killers of the Flower Moon. But some observers find her character less fully and satisfyingly written than those played by DiCaprio and De Niro, meaning that the film ultimately centres on white men and the birth of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Root website asked , “Is Killers of the Flower Moon the Indigenous Community’s Green Book?” – a reference to the Oscar winning 2018 film accused of featuring a “ magical negro ” whose sole purpose was to improve the white protagonist.

Rule, author of Indigenous DC : Native Peoples and the Nation’s Capital, says: “I wanted the perspectives of the Indigenous characters more forefront in the storytelling. But more than that, I wish that there was a message letting audiences know that the violence they witnessed was not the result of individual greed but rather of the systemic devaluing of Indigenous lives under the process of settler colonialism.

“The film gives us a look into one family’s experiences but the story of violence is a common one shared by hundreds of tribes across the US and it also didn’t start or end in the 1920s. This violence began with the very colonisation of this land and it continues today .”

But Rule adds: “I want to uplift and applaud the various Native American contributors to the film – Lily Gladstone, Tantoo Cardinal, Tatanka Means, Robbie Robertson and more – who took on what I understand to be a sacred responsibility of representing the Indigenous lives and community who were targeted in violence precisely because they were Indigenous.

“I want to thank and be very thankful to the Osage community and the Osage family whose story this is. It takes incredible bravery, fortitude and even a sacrifice to share this painful story that still reverberates through their own lived experiences today with millions of viewers.”

The sentiment is shared by Mary Kathryn Nagle of the Cherokee nation , a lawyer, playwright and screenwriter who is from Oklahoma and knows many of the actors well. She says: “The acting in this film is absolutely spectacular. It’s raised awareness of an issue with the American public that a lot of folks were not aware of and that’s critically important.”

But Nagle wishes the screenplay had given more of a character arc and more agency to Mollie Burkhart’s character. “Martin Scorsese was holding up a mirror to white American society to invite a majority white audience to see themselves in the Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio characters, which is an important thing to do. But I would like to have seen more of Molly’s journey instead of just reacting to the tragedy of it all. There’s a lot of things she was doing off camera that could have been on camera.”

Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon

Nagle, whose play Manahatta opens at the Public Theater in New York later this month, adds: “I do believe that Martin Scorsese did his best to work with the Osage community and to honour them in the telling of the story.

“I also at the same time think that, had a Native person been above the line, you probably would have seen more of a character arc in the way that the lead Native character was portrayed. That’s nothing to do with the acting – Lily’s acting was phenomenal – but when Native writers write these stories they tend to give the Native characters a little bit more nuance and depth.”

She concludes on a positive note: “Hollywood doesn’t change overnight. That’s why it’s important for us to reflect on, especially as Native people in the audience, what more we would like to see in terms of storytelling about us. We can also celebrate this film. We can also appreciate the fact that one of America’s best film-makers ever did make a film about this story and worked with the community to such a degree that you see his portrayal didn’t fall into stereotypes.

“We can of course critique the ways in which the main Osage character didn’t have as fully developed a character arc as her white counterparts. However, we also didn’t see a lot of the tropes and stereotypes we would normally see in a film of this genre. We saw a lot of beautiful, authentic portrayals of the Osage people in a way that Hollywood hasn’t given us before and that’s something to celebrate. ”

Robert Warrior, a citizen of the Osage nation and professor of American literature and culture at the University of Kansas, argues that Killers of the Flower Moon pays too little attention to how the policies of the federal government enabled Native American dispossession, for example by pressuring the Osage to subdivide their reservation into individual allotments.

The 1920s rush to drill for oil made the Osages spectacularly rich. But they could bequeath their “headright” shares to anyone, including non-Osage people, which drew white people to step in as “guardians” with ulterior motives. This was the backdrop to the murder spree.

Warrior says: “I appreciate the extent to which the external markers of the Osage – language, clothes – are portrayed accurately. The presence of tons of Osage people in the film itself is pretty neat.

Robert de Niro, Martin Scorsese and Lily Gladstone pose during a photocall in Cannes

“My frustration with the film is similar to my frustration with David Grann’s book, which is it doesn’t provide the context of what enabled these murders and lots of other murders to happen: the federal policy of allotment, including the development of a bureaucracy, which made Native resources available to non-Osagers or non-Natives. Without making that point it doesn’t seem to me that any attempt to understand this particular story does the work that it needs to do or can do as a Hollywood film. ”

Dennis McAuliffe , a member of the Osage nation and author The Deaths of Sybil Bolton: Oil, Greed, and Murder on the Osage Reservation, agrees that more context is necessary. He asks: “Where in the movie was there an explanation of headrights? Where in the movie was there an explanation of allotment? Where in the movie was there an explanation for how Osages got guardians and how the guardians were able to steal millions of dollars from them? Nothing.

“The guardians were portrayed as murderers, as they were in real life, but there is no explanation for how it happened. Where was the explanation for the role and fault of the US Congress in all of this by passing the 1906 Osage Allotment Act, which created this system of headrights, the land, as well as the guardians, which led to the murders. I’m not saying it’s an accurate or inaccurate portrayal of Native Americans but it was an inaccurate portrayal of the history and the system that created this disaster.”

McAuliffe notes that both his and Grann’s books drew heavily on FBI files. “ If the story were written now by, say, somebody who had not read the FBI files – Native writers, Native directors, Native producers – you have a completely different story.

“I’m not saying the movie was good, bad or indifferent. Actually, to tell you the truth, I was so prepared for the worst that I actually kind of liked it. Let me quote my cousin, who saw it shortly before he died: ‘It wasn’t as bad as I feared.’ That’s exactly what I would say.”

Killers of the Flower Moon
Native Americans
Martin Scorsese
Leonardo DiCaprio
Robert De Niro

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Cannes: Scorsese’s ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ grips, disturbs — and disappoints

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Like more than a few Martin Scorsese epics, the searing, sprawling “Killers of the Flower Moon” recounts a horrific campaign of violence from the inside. Adapted from David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book , the movie revisits an oil-rich, increasingly blood-soaked stretch of 1920s Oklahoma — a land whose wealthy Osage Nation owners have begun to die under brutal and mysterious circumstances. The killers’ identities aren’t obvious, at least not at first, though their motives very much are: Their aim is to right the balance in a world where their presumed racial and cultural inferiors have been granted an unworthy position of influence. To that end, the Osage must be divested of their riches by any means necessary, including oppression and extortion, marriage and murder.

The movie, which premiered out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, is both like and unlike anything its director has ever done.

It finds Scorsese reteaming with two of his favorite actors, who last appeared together three decades ago in “This Boy’s Life”: Robert De Niro plays William Hale, a powerful cattle rancher in Fairfax, Okla., and Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, his obedient if somewhat feckless nephew.

The larger sphere in which these two men and many others operate is, on one level, a familiar Scorsesean jumble of work and family, money and violence. And yet in its balance of Wild West expanses and intimate domestic spaces, and its focus on Indigenous men and women whose good fortune quickly turns ill, this world is also, for Scorsese, a fascinating new visual, dramatic and political frontier.

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.

A man in a car places his hand on the arm of a man standing next to it.

And a pause, at this juncture, is perhaps worth taking. Since well before the movie was even completed, the anticipation around “Killers of the Flower Moon” has been especially feverish. That’s partly because every new Scorsese movie is an event, for better or worse, and partly because its arrival, for some cinephiles, would be the truest sign that the movies, at least as we knew and loved them before March 2020, are well and truly back.

Before it begins streaming on Apple TV+, “Killers” will receive an October theatrical release through Paramount Pictures, which will provide a test of how large an audience remains for a filmmaker of Scorsese’s nonindustrial bent and epic ambitions. (His previous movie, 2019’s “The Irishman,” was distributed by Netflix.)

The movie’s unveiling at Cannes marks a meaningful return for a filmmaker who won the Palme d’Or here almost 50 years ago for “Taxi Driver” (1976) and whose unflagging commitment to world cinema can honestly be called commensurate with the festival’s own. But navigating Cannes can also be tricky, which may explain the caution apparent at the movie’s premiere: It received only one public gala screening at the festival and was slotted out of competition, though the festival’s director, Thierry Frémaux, has noted in interviews that he invited Scorsese’s movie to compete.

At a time when the state of cinema looks at once promising and as precarious as ever, a gamble as risky as Scorsese’s — and he is, as many of us have noted, a filmmaker who thrives on risk — comes cloaked in concerns about an acclaimed white filmmaker taking on a story of Indigenous suffering, plus the more banal anxieties about reviews, hype and awards season.

US actor Harrison Ford reacts on stage before being awarded with an Honourary Palme d'or prior to the screening of the film "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" during the 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 18, 2023. (Photo by Valery HACHE / AFP) (Photo by VALERY HACHE/AFP via Getty Images)

‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’: Inside the Cannes premiere

“I just saw my life flash before my eyes,” Ford said at Cannes on Thursday, thanking wife Calista Flockhart and his “Dial of Destiny” collaborators.

May 18, 2023

My own preliminary thoughts on “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which I look forward to revisiting closer to release, will attempt to avoid feeding either of those pitfalls. (It will also attempt to avoid giving away too many plot details, though since history can’t really be spoiled, read on with caution.)

Any proper estimation of the movie must begin with an appreciation of Grann’s painstakingly researched book, an intricately layered detective story that Scorsese and his co-writer, Eric Roth, try and sometimes struggle to condense. One of their shrewder tactics is to begin the story as an odd-couple courtship as Ernest, a war veteran, ingratiates himself with the wealthy, wary Mollie.

“He wants our money,” one of her relatives warns her. Mollie doesn’t deny it, but she also can’t deny that Ernest, though not the brightest of suitors, is handsome and charming and seems to genuinely care for her in an aw-shucks kind of way. An early shot of the two future spouses seated side by side at a table, quietly enjoying each other’s company, seems to put them on equal and trustworthy footing.

A man takes a woman's hand and guides her out of a car.

It’s a lovely image and also a lie. Years pass, children are born and the killings begin. Mollie’s sister Anna (Cara Jade Myers) is found shot to death near a river; their mother, Lizzie (Tantoo Cardinal), dies of a “wasting illness,” the same that will soon come to afflict Mollie. The deaths of these and multiple other Osage men and women in the surrounding community are rattled off in somber, dispassionate narration; few of them, we learn, resulted in any police action or investigation.

Hale, played with scarily authoritative restraint by De Niro, looms over the proceedings like a shadow; Ernest, like some of the other flop-sweat cases DiCaprio has played for Scorsese, becomes increasingly racked with guilt and self-loathing. Corruption and red herrings abound; bombs explode and bombshells are dropped. Answers are few and far between.

The truth comes slowly tumbling out — and justice of a sort is achieved — thanks only to the dogged work of Tom White (an underused Jesse Plemons ), a gifted federal investigator tasked by an off-screen J. Edgar Hoover with getting to the bottom of the Osage murders.

Grann’s book doubles, thrillingly, as an early history of the FBI, and White emerges as its most compelling character. Disappointingly, his role and those of his fellow detectives, many of whom have to operate undercover, are given comparatively short shrift on-screen. It’s an understandable narrative strategy in a movie that wants to avoid the obvious, triumphalist conventions of the detective procedural and that wants to be a grim indictment of genocidal capitalism. But that becomes harder and harder to do as the story’s emotional and psychological weight shifts disproportionately toward Ernest, and in ways that DiCaprio’s increasingly anguished perma-frown of a performance can’t entirely shoulder.

A scene from Catherine Corsini's "Homecoming" ("Le Retour").

Cannes kicks off with controversies and chuckles as it returns to full force

It’s a strange way of life indeed at the 76th Cannes Film Festival, where rough weather, scandal-mired movies and Indiana Jones collide.

This is hardly the first time Scorsese has placed a man’s tormented soul boldly front and center; his two most recent movies, the very different “Silence” (2016) and “The Irishman” (2019), managed this with particular brilliance. But the triple-threat combo of Scorsese, DiCaprio and De Niro, obviously the movie’s main selling point, also comes to feel like its central distraction.

Gladstone’s performance, a heartrending mix of authority, confusion and fear, goes a long way toward keeping this dynamic in check, as Ernest and Mollie’s marriage becomes its own wrenching metaphor for the cruelty of Manifest Destiny. She’s the key to the movie’s more resonant, Osage-focused moments, the ones with little visual or narrative precedent in the director’s filmography.

At times you’ll wish cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto would linger longer on the wide-open prairie landscapes or on the lively, quotidian hustle and bustle in the streets of Fairfax. At key moments, Scorsese and his co-writer, Roth, will dramatize an Osage wedding, burial or other ceremonial tradition, pausing to take in the faces in the crowd and the intricate patterns on their robes. Or they’ll usher us into a meeting where tribal elders speak out against the violence being done to them.

The impact of their story may ultimately be more muffled than it should be, but in these isolated moments you hear their voices, their fury and their despair loud and clear.

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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Movie Review: ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

NEW YORK (OSV News) – Emotional ambiguity pervades the dramatization “Killers of the Flower Moon” (Paramount/Apple TV+). Epic yet intimate, director and co-writer Martin Scorsese’s masterful recounting of real-life events in 1920s Oklahoma is too gritty for kids, but deeply rewarding for grown-ups and possibly acceptable for older teens.

As relatively few viewers may know, shortly before the turn of the 20th century, oil was discovered on land owned by the indigenous Osage Nation. By the dawn of the Jazz Age, the windfall that followed had brought the Native Americans prosperity. But it had also excited violent envy and greed among some of the area’s whites.

Stepping into the midst of this volatile blend of good fortune and malice comes returning World War I veteran Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio). The uncertainty characteristic of the story takes hold when Ernest meets strong-willed, wise Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone).

Ernest’s cattle rancher uncle Bill Hale (Robert De Niro), a local bigwig, points out the economic advantage to be gained by marrying an Osage woman who, like Mollie, has a headright to a share of the petroleum profits. But the screenplay, which Scorsese penned with Eric Roth, also establishes that Ernest and Mollie do genuinely fall for each other before rapidly tying the knot.

There’s a lengthening shadow hovering over the Osage community as they do so, however. A series of initially uninvestigated deaths have taken place that hardly seem attributable to natural causes. The remainder of the film, adapted from David Grann’s 2017 bestseller, is devoted to exploring the effects of this ongoing rash of fatalities on Ernest, Mollie and Bill.

By the time Federal agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons) arrives to delve into the mystery, Scorsese has presented us with a panorama of the time and place that serves as the backdrop to an intense tale of love, corruption and racial hatred. Top-flight writing, acting and cinematography all combine to make his outsized, three-and-a-half hour movie memorable.

Interestingly, Mollie is shown to be a devout Catholic who nonetheless practices various rituals traditional among the Osage. We’re not given enough evidence, though, to judge whether this combination represents inspired do-it-yourself inculturation or some unacceptable form of syncretism.

Mollie’s genuine faith stands in stark contrast to the religious hypocrisy of one of the other central figures. And it may account for the aura of tranquility she manages to maintain throughout the unfolding tragedy by which she – along with many others – is eventually victimized.

Mollie’s enduring stillness at the center of a human storm is just one of the powerful impressions viewers will take away from this subtle and unsettling saga. The fate of Ernest’s Everyman character, as he makes decisive moral choices that typify, in microcosm, a consistent theme in American history, is another. Overall, Scorsese’s audience will be left with much to ponder.

The film contains brief but graphic episodes of gory violence, gruesome sights, a scene of marital sensuality, several uses of profanity, a few milder oaths and occasional rough and crude language. The OSV News classification is A-III — adults. The Motion Picture Association rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

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'Killers of the Flower Moon' Book to Film Comparison

Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Killers of the Flower Moon.

Killers of the Flower Moon shifts its focus to center around the character of Mollie, making her central to the story.
The evil nature of Robert De Niro's character, William Hale, is revealed early on, adding to the tension and horror.
The film is not about the FBI solving a mystery, but rather highlights the deep-rooted corruption and injustice of the situation.

Of all the historical dramas you’ll ever see, there are few that make such critically significant changes from their source material quite like Martin Scorsese ’s Killers of the Flower Moon . Starring Leonardo DiCaprio , Lily Gladstone , and Robert De Niro , it depicts the true story of how the Osage were murdered for their wealth in 1920s Oklahoma. Though based on the 2017 book of the same name by David Grann , it could not be more different in focus and scope the longer that you get into it. While the story remains the same, the way Scorsese goes about telling it is crucial to its impact. Thus, here are the differences between the book and the film.

Killers of the Flower Moon

When oil is discovered in 1920s Oklahoma under Osage Nation land, the Osage people are murdered one by one - until the FBI steps in to unravel the mystery.

Release Date 2023-10-20

Director Martin Scorsese

Cast Cara Jade Myers, Robert De Niro, Tantoo Cardinal, Lily Gladstone, Leonardo DiCaprio, John Lithgow, Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser

Runtime 206 minutes

Genres Drama, Crime, History

Lily Gladstone’s Mollie Is More Central in 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

Not only is the film at its best when Gladstone is on screen , but it is much more centered around her character of Mollie than the book was. Though it still could have very well had more of her, that is just a reason to seek out works like the upcoming Fancy Dance however you can. In regards to this film, it shifts away from being about the formation of the FBI as much as the book was to instead keep her at the forefront. Rather than just relying on the knowledge that Mollie was being poisoned and leaving that in the background while the investigation unfolds as Grann did, this grim core to the film is something that we are never allowed to forget. As Scorsese has himself said in interviews , there was a desire on his part to do right by the Osage in telling this story. While the film remains more than open to criticism in how it does so , this reframing of the story still is one of the primary ways it works to distinguish itself from the book. There is more detail to this that plays out in the very end, but there are a couple of other key elements that must be discussed before this.

Robert De Niro’s William Hale Is Clearly Evil From the Start in 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

Not only is De Niro’s most recent collaboration unlike anything he and Scorsese have ever done together , but it is also one where his character of Hale is revealed as being a wolf in sheep’s clothing almost right from the jump. The book played the eventual reveal of him being the one behind all of the killings as a surprise, which is another fundamental difference in framing that we’ll get to, while the film does almost the complete opposite. We know rather quickly what Hale is doing because he lays it all out to Ernest (DiCaprio) the more the two talk together. The depths of his depravity are no less horrifying because of this. In fact, it makes it that much more unsettling to see De Niro's Hale openly plot to set more and more murders in motion for money. He does it in almost plain sight, making each outburst of violence feel like another slow-moving train about to decimate an entire community. The terror comes from how everyone who could stop it not only chooses not to do so, but hurries it along.

'Killers of the Flower Moon' Review: Lily Gladstone Stuns in Martin Scorsese's Flawed Epic

'killers of the flower moon' is not about the fbi solving a mystery.

Though Jesse Plemons does make a great small appearance towards the end of the film as investigator Tom White, who was essentially the driving force of the entire middle of the book, this is not a story where the cavalry from the government will swoop in to save the day. To Grann’s credit, he also acknowledged at several points how their coming in was not only not enough to repair the harm that was done, but they also missed out on what were certainly countless more murders. Scorsese takes it a step further in how he pushes us to sit with the full scope of just how rotten to the core the entire situation was. Where the book treated it as a mystery to be solved, there are no discoveries to be made here. Once White and his team of investigators show up, there are so many lives that have been lost that will never be brought back. We already know who is behind it and are just waiting for the supposed forces of justice to catch up before even more is lost. The reality of it all is that they will only be able to stem the flow of blood, but not fully heal the wound. In many ways, that is where Scorsese makes what is his final yet most significant change to not just this story, but any film he's ever made.

Scorsese Himself Steps Under the Spotlight in 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

In an unexpected cameo where the director pulls back the curtain on the whole film , we are taken out of the story and into a radio play. Though Grann had made reference to such events and the way they sanded down the full reality of what happened, Scorsese actually goes about bringing it to life. It then ends with him stepping on the stage himself to deliver the final lines of the film about how Mollie’s obituary did not mention the murders. It is the type of breaking of the fourth wall that is a huge gamble, but it brings into focus how the immense harm that was wrought upon the Osage is not something that can be confined to the past. For all the horrors of the past, the present is just as much about recreating that same dehumanization. Scorsese does not let himself off the hook in that and instead shows how there is still much that he is doing which cannot fully do justice to this history. As he brings us all the way into the present, it leaves one more lingering moment of enduring pain to grapple with.

Killers of the Flower Moon is now available to stream on Apple TV+ in the U.S.

Watch on Apple TV+

'Killers of the Flower Moon' Book to Film Comparison

COMMENTS

Killers of the Flower Moon movie review (2023)
Killers of the Flower Moon. "Can you find the wolves in this picture," Ernest Burkhardt ( Leonardo DiCaprio) reads aloud as he works his way through a children's book early in Martin Scorsese 's "Killers of the Flower Moon.". The wolves aren't really hidden at all, and they won't be in the film that follows either, a masterful ...
'Killers of the Flower Moon' Review: An Unsettling Masterpiece
The movie is based on David Grann's 2017 book "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I.," a nonfiction account of how, in the early 20th century, greedy ...
Killers of the Flower Moon
Movie Info. Based on David Grann's broadly lauded best-selling book, "Killers of the Flower Moon" is set in 1920s Oklahoma and depicts the serial murder of members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation ...
Killers of the Flower Moon review
Into this situation arrives a slippery, venal individual called Ernest, played by Leonardo DiCaprio; an ambitious but also submissive and fundamentally inadequate man: greedy, stupid and biddable.
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Killers of the Flower Moon: Directed by Martin Scorsese. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons. When oil is discovered in 1920s Oklahoma under Osage Nation land, the Osage people are murdered one by one - until the FBI steps in to unravel the mystery.
Killers of the Flower Moon
Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 1, 2024. Dolores Quintana Dolores Quintana. KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON is worth every nano-second of its three-hour and twenty-six-minute running time. A ...
Killers of the Flower Moon review
Lily Gladstone on Killers of the Flower Moon: 'It's paramount Native stories are told by indigenous film-makers' 20 Dec 2023 Best movies of 2023 in the US: No 2 - Killers of the Flower Moon
Killers of the Flower Moon review: a brutal snapshot of America's truth
Killers of the Flower Moon is often a film of subtlety, particularly in the way it shows you how innocuous aspects of everyday life like medicine, food, and alcohol can be weaponized by authority ...
Killers of the Flower Moon Review
This review originally ran following the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Killers of the Flower Moon is as brutal as they come. It spans dozens of murders over several years, across a herculean 206 ...
Dramatic and Moral Ambitions Clash in "Killers of the Flower Moon
Anthony Lane reviews Martin Scorsese's "Killers of the Flower Moon," an epic drama about the Osage murders, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone.
'Killers of the Flower Moon' Review: Scorsese's Overlong ...
'Killers of the Flower Moon' Review: Martin Scorsese's Osage Murders Movie Is Overlong but Never Slow Reviewed at Christine 21, Paris, May 12, 2023. In Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition).
Review
Review by Ann Hornaday. October 18, 2023 at 10:00 a.m. EDT ... If "Killers of the Flower Moon" isn't as purely pleasurable to watch as Scorsese's most canonical movies, that doesn't mean ...
'Killers of the Flower Moon' review: Scorsese centers men and violence
Martin Scorsese's film, based on David Grann's book, tells the true story of white men in the 1920s who married into and systematically murdered Osage families to gain claims to their oil-rich land.
Killers of the Flower Moon review: Martin Scorsese's epic is ambitious
KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON ★★★½ (M) 206 minutes. The camera lifts above a car being driven on a dirt road, early in Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon.It keeps on lifting until ...
Killers of the Flower Moon review
It's also the richest, strongest movie he's made in nearly 30 years. Back from the war, Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) needs money, a fresh start and perhaps a young wife. His uncle, William Hale ...
'Killers Of The Flower Moon' Review: Martin Scorsese Directs ...
At 80, Martin Scorsese has finally made a Western, and it packs a wallop. The much anticipated Killers of the Flower Moon had its world premiere on Saturday night at the Cannes Film Festival, an ...
Killers of the Flower Moon (film)
Killers of the Flower Moon is a 2023 American epic Western crime drama film co-written, produced, and directed by Martin Scorsese. Eric Roth and Scorsese based their screenplay on the 2017 non-fiction book by David Grann. Set in 1920s Oklahoma, it focuses on a series of murders of Osage members and relations in the Osage Nation after oil was discovered on tribal land.
Killers of the Flower Moon Movie Review
Lily Gladstone is talented beyond measure. She deserves every accolade for her work in this film. With a run time of three and a half hours, Killers Of The Flower Moon holds the audience captivated from the first scene to the last. It does not miss a beat throughout. This film exemplifies a true masterclass in filmmaking.
Killers of the Flower Moon
In Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese gives us another cautionary tale, but without the gratuity. Yes, he's aided by the movie's time setting, when the f-word wasn't hurled like pebbles on a playground. Yes, the movie is still rated R, and with reason. Killers mangle bodies and snuff out lives with barely a backward glance.
What to Know on the History Behind 'Killers of the Flower Moon'
What to Know About 'Killers of the Flower Moon': A Guide to the Osage Murders. Martin Scorsese's epic traces a real plot by white men to kill dozens of Native Americans who held oil rights ...
'Hollywood doesn't change overnight': Indigenous viewers on Killers of
But Killers of the Flower Moon, a western true-crime thriller about the systematic killing of Osage Nation members for their oil-rich land in the 1920s, is generating mixed feelings and opinions ...
'Killers of the Flower Moon' review: Scorsese disappoints at Cannes
By Justin Chang Film Critic. May 20, 2023 12:45 PM PT. CANNES, France —. Like more than a few Martin Scorsese epics, the searing, sprawling "Killers of the Flower Moon" recounts a horrific ...
Movie Review: 'Killers of the Flower Moon'
Movie Review: 'Killers of the Flower Moon'. NEW YORK (OSV News) - Emotional ambiguity pervades the dramatization "Killers of the Flower Moon" (Paramount/Apple TV+). Epic yet intimate, director and co-writer Martin Scorsese's masterful recounting of real-life events in 1920s Oklahoma is too gritty for kids, but deeply rewarding for ...
'Killers of the Flower Moon' Book to Film Comparison
Killers of the Flower Moon shifts its focus to center around the character of Mollie, making her central to the story.; The evil nature of Robert De Niro's character, William Hale, is revealed ...

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Scorsese’s latest demands — not asks — us to witness the horrors the US has wrought upon the Osage Nation and understand some of what it means for Indigenous people to survive in this country today.

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Reviewed at Christine 21, Paris, May 12, 2023. In Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition). Running time: 206 MIN.

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