Director Martin Scorsese has more classics to his name than most directors, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas among them. It seems we now add Scorsese's latest Killers of the Flower Moon to the list – the word coming out of the Cannes Film Festival is that it's an epic, incendiary look at the fabric of American society.
The movie is adapted from David Grann's book of the same name. It explores the mysterious spate of deaths that blighted the oil-rich Oklahoma Osage nation in the early 20th century and the ensuing FBI investigation that unearthed a horrific conspiracy. Scorsese works with Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth to adapt Grann's book and his cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro and Lily Gladstone.
Cannes critics (who also gave their verdict on the new Indiana Jones movie) have lauded Killers of the Flower Moon as a Scorsese masterpiece: epic in its sweep and piercing in its acumen as to the corrupting nature of power and greed. This is a theme to which Scorsese has returned time and again, only Killers of the Flower Moon mines this rich seam over the course of (near-enough) four sprawling hours.
"[A picture] brimming with reverence for a culture that survived a horrible trauma as it is filled with exhilarating flourishes, film history references, and explorations of the faultline between the sacred and profane. And yes: It’s a masterpiece," raves Rolling Stone's David Fear.
The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney describes the movie as "searing", adding: "This is a sprawling, densely plotted work that demands a lot of its audience. But the three-and-a-half-hour running time is fully justified in an escalating tragedy that never loosens its grip — a sordid illustration of historical erasure with echoes in today’s bitterly divisive political gamesmanship.
"Killers of the Flower Moon suggests film-makers should keep on keeping on," writes Charlotte O'Sullivan for London Evening Standard. "I’d even put my cowboy boot on the line and declare this (Scorsese’s first foray into the genre) one of the best Westerns ever made and almost certainly the best film of 2023 so far."
Fionnuala Hannigan writes in Screen International: "Killers Of The Flower Moon is a Great American Film... in the old-fashioned sense of that term; an attempt to capture the soul of the nation, and the length and breadth of its original sin. Lifting his camera to survey the wide open plains of the past, Scorsese extracts an epic Western from horrible real-life crimes committed against the Native American Osage tribe of, latterly, Oklahoma, delivering something biblical, human, yet deeply inhumane. Set in the 1920s, Killers Of The Flower Moon is of John Huston scope, with some of the edge of a Chinatown. This is terrific cinema, full to its 206-minute brim."
That's a smattering of the rave responses. You'll be able to make your own mind up when Killers of the Flower Moon is released theatrically on October 20th. Check out the trailer below.
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