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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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‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Review: An Unsettling Masterpiece

Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour epic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is a romance, a western, a whodunit and a lesson in the bloody history of the Osage murders of the 1920s.

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‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director martin scorsese narrates a sequence in which the character ernest burkhart, played by leonardo dicaprio, is cornered by investigators..

I’m Martin Scorsese, and I was the director and co-writer and co-producer of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon.’ By this point in the story, it’s become pretty evident that the people who’ve been perpetrating the disappearances and murders of the Osage Native Americans in order to gain their headrights, their oil money, are being investigated. And they’ve narrowed it down to whom they thought the weakest link would be. The one they know they could probably get the information from or break is Ernest Burkhart. And he’s played by Leo DiCaprio. “Well, here we go.” Since the characters are all circling around each other in the movie, and since the circle gets tighter and tighter, my drawing for the shot was simply a circle with an arrow. That was it. “My wife’s real sick.” I want it to become a kind of circular ballet. He gets up, he turns in circles, the camera circles around him, and as that’s happening, other figures are coming into frame from left and right. And as he pivots around and tries to explain that his wife is sick, which is an understatement, the camera keeps tracking around. “You got this, you got this all wrong.” Until finally, we get to the door, and he tells his little son, which is an improv, he says, go with him now, son, go with him. “My wife, she’s real sick!” That was one of the most enjoyable moments, laying out that shot. And then the interrogation begins. I had to be very careful by that point, because once scenes and stories like this end up in police stations or interrogation rooms, I find the images to become flat and uninteresting. And so I said, let’s be dealing with angles that are like boring into the characters. Not boring images, but boring, really focused on them. The angles would have to be head on. But what was interesting to me, is that when we cut to Leo, when he gets very tired, it fades out. But then it fades back in. And when it fades back in, you’re still in the same shot. We may have faded away for an hour to two hours. You don’t expect to come fading back in on the same image. That’s what I hope. “I need to sit down.” “Yes, you do, but you’re standing.” That’s when he really has lost his senses and he’s really, really tired. “I’m gon’ have to get some sleep.” In a way, what I had to do, was fight a tendency to maybe over-design camera interpretation. And in so doing, that tension, I think, is held in the frame. And then finally when it does move, it means something. When it does cut, it means something, as much as possible. “And did you put the explosives under the house?” “I don’t know nothing about no explosives.”

By Manohla Dargis

There’s a scene in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” when the screen fills with men toiling in what looks like a lake of fire. Inky silhouettes in a red-orange void, they look like Boschian imps, but these are ordinary men in a hell of human making. It’s a rightly apocalyptic image for this cruel and baroque American story of love, murder, greed and unspeakable betrayal in 1920s Indian Country, a true-crime epic that Scorsese — with grace, sorrow and sublime filmmaking clarity — has turned into a requiem for the country.

This may seem like strange territory for Scorsese, with his New York wiseguys and street corners. Yet he has always ranged wide and far in his work, from the Roman Empire in “The Last Temptation of Christ” to 1930s Tibet in “Kundun” and then home again for the 1980s and ’90s of “The Wolf of Wall Street.” During his wanderings, Scorsese has never strayed far from Hollywood or rather its filmmaking foundations, which he has helped keep alive through his tireless advocacy for the art, though principally by doing what all great artists do: by reinvigorating and reinventing forms, and making them his own.

Throughout, Scorsese has also reminded you that there are many ways to tell stories, including about evil. This one, set largely on the Osage Reservation in northern Oklahoma, revisits a history of violence as fraught and bloody as that of the United States itself. The crimes it primarily recounts trace back to 1921 (there were earlier killings), and involved the murder of several dozen Osage (there may have been many more victims). Some were shot, others were blown up, while still others died from an enigmatic wasting illness, though were likely poisoned. The era is often referred to as the Osage Reign of Terror, an odd description that wrongly implies the Osage were somehow responsible for the horrors perpetrated on them.

Scorsese, who shares screenplay credit with Eric Roth, has given this story both scale and intimacy. This is a big, bigger-than-life movie with sweeping vistas and soaring camerawork, but one that incessantly shifts from bright, wide-open spaces to interiors as shadowy as their inhabitants. First among the richly populated cast is Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a war veteran who, when he steps off a steam locomotive and onto a crowded train platform in Fairfax, Okla., plunges into a Hobbesian churn of humanity. All around him, people are moving, shouting; some are fighting. It’s exciting and disorienting, and Ernest looks at once energized and more than a little bewildered, like a child set adrift in a crowd of strangers.

Always a quick worker, Scorsese establishes the time and place with seamless efficiency. Ernest has come to Oklahoma to work with his uncle, William Hale (a terrific Robert De Niro), a well-to-do, glad-handing cattle rancher who lives with his small family in a large, gloomy house surrounded by prairie. Known as “the King of the Osage Hills,” Hale welcomes Ernest into the fold with amused prurience: He asks if Ernest brought anything back from the war, a.k.a. the clap (no), and if he likes women (yes). Hale also delivers a brief lesson on the Osage, who in recent decades have become enormously wealthy from their oil strikes. They are, Hale says, “the finest, the wealthiest and most beautiful people on God’s earth.”

Ernest tethers you to the story and its early buzz and confusion, and you discover this new world and its people largely through him. He soon sets himself up as a chauffeur-for-hire in Fairfax, a boomtown that’s still shaking off the dust of the 19th century. There, Scorsese makes an entire social order come alive — he has an ethnographer’s eye — as roadsters race past horses and buggies on the main dirt strip, and a white salesman on bended knee implores a Native family to buy another luxury automobile. It’s amid this tumult that Ernest meets Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone, wonderful), an Osage woman with watchful eyes and a colorful blanket that she drapes over her shoulders like a royal mantle. They flirt, and soon wed.

Ernest and Mollie’s courtship develops with graceful naturalism — the two actors make immediate sense together — and their relationship grounds the story emotionally. Now 48, DiCaprio is about twice as old as the real Ernest was at the time, and age has made his face more yielding and eloquent. Ernest looks like he’s been beaten up by life (the war presumably took a toll, too), and when you first see him, a large frown is tugging his face downward, giving him a sour, dyspeptic look that only really lifts when his and Mollie’s romance takes flight. Sometime later, you realize that his uncle has the exact same frown, although Hale, who presents himself as a welcoming man of the people, is careful about who sees his displeasure.

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 whites preyed on the newly oil-rich tribe. The book is informative, stark and relentlessly grim; the depravity of some of the crimes can be shocking. In adapting it, Scorsese and Roth have more or less jettisoned the second half of Grann’s subtitle: There’s little in the movie about the Federal Bureau of Investigation, its foundational years or its newly appointed young director, J. Edgar Hoover. (The story may horrify you, but it’s hard not to laugh when DiCaprio meets his first fed — portrayed by the reliably good Jesse Plemons — given that DiCaprio played Hoover in “J. Edgar.”)

Scorsese and Roth have also thinned the larger history that Grann sketches in, leaving just enough of the Osage’s catastrophic relations with the United States to connect the present to the past, and to give some backdrop to the guardianship system the government instituted to control both tribal members and the wealth from their mineral rights. (Full-blooded American Indians, Grann writes, were usually declared “incompetent” and appointed white guardians.) That history emerges elliptically throughout the movie in different narrative forms, including in Hale’s descriptions of the Osage, via an illustrated book, during a tribal meeting and on a radio program — each a reminder that history belongs to those who tell it.

For his telling, Scorsese has drawn on assorted genres — the movie is at once a romance, a western, a domestic drama, a whodunit and, finally, a police procedural — that effortlessly mix, ebb and flow. It’s an energetic and unexpected amalgam, but partly because Scorsese uses genre to his ends rather than conforming to its conventions, the overall effect can be destabilizing: He’s not boxed in by obvious narrative cues, and neither are you. That means that you’re never sure where the story is headed or why, which is enjoyable and adds to the overall mystery. Yet, as the murders continue to mount, and the story grows ever more outrageous and horrifying, this destabilization can also feel ominous, even dangerous.

Part of the pleasure and, for lack of a better word, magic of Scorsese’s work is how both the entirety of his filmmaking and his subjects are of an expressive piece when he’s in his groove. Scorsese once said of a John Cassavetes film, “the emotion was in the emulsion”: Like recognizes like. That’s what Scorsese imitators badly miss when they try to crib from him. When Henry Hill and his girlfriend stroll into the Copacabana during the famous long take in “Goodfellas” — a blissed-out interlude in which the characters, camera and music flow together — Scorsese isn’t showboating; he is, rather, using the full force of his technique to capture a specific moment in time in all its delirium and voluptuousness.

After Ernest and Mollie marry, he moves into her house, where she lives with her ailing mother, Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal), and her sister Anna (a vibrant Cara Jade Myers), a sybarite with a pistol in her handbag. The story’s romance is warmly inviting, and DiCaprio and Gladstone work beautifully together, their different performance styles — Ernest is physically demonstrative while Mollie is reserved — creating a contrapuntal whole. You believe in these characters but also, crucially, you believe them as a couple and in the tenderness of their love. You watch them settle into each other’s bodies in bed and, at other times, lean into each other so that their foreheads touch, as if to silently share their thoughts.

Here, there’s emotion in every camera move, darting look, mirroring frown, silence, gesture as well as in the crowds that by turns embrace and threaten; it’s also in the pointed repeat of a possessive adjective. When Ernest is first being taken to Hale’s house, he asks the Osage driver, Henry Roan (William Belleau), whose land this is. Henry’s answer (“my land”) echoes what Mollie says when Ernest asks her what color her skin is (“my color”), each an assertion of sovereignty that becomes more meaningful as one after another Osage is murdered. It’s not for nothing that much later when Hale dresses down Ernest, Scorsese shoots them on a black-and-white checkered floor, underscoring their respective roles as king and pawn.

After I saw “Killers of the Flower Moon” a second time, I kept flashing on “Goodfellas” and “Kundun” because the intimacy and horror of this new movie’s violence reminded me of those earlier films. The violence here has a specific history but also a different texture and depth: It seeps into this movie like the crude oil that both liberates and condemns the Osage. You see the oil bubbling up in the prairie early on, like some misplaced witchy cauldron. As the oil begins to gurgle and then to gush, it splatters a half-dozen Osage men who’ve started to dance ecstatically at the discovery, their bodies slicked with petroleum — a harbinger of the blood that, as Scorsese reminds you in this heartbreaking masterpiece, has long engulfed us all.

Killers of the Flower Moon Rated R for gun and bomb violence, and an open-air postmortem. Running time: 3 hours 26 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic of The Times, which she joined in 2004. She has an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Killers of the Flower Moon Reviews

There’s acting and there’s existing in a realm as a performer. Lily Gladstone exists as Mollie Burkhart. She downplays the act, she breathes through the character, patiently waits, exerts power, and navigates a hostile world...

Full Review | Apr 17, 2024

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

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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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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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The Osage called it the “Reign of Terror.” Once upon a time, long after they’d been forcibly displaced and sold land in the Oklahoma territories deemed barren and unfruitful, the Indigenous tribe had discovered oil under the ground. And more oil. And still more oil after that. They became rich. Like Gatsby-level rich. Then, in the early 1920s, members of the community began suffering from a mysterious “wasting illness.” And when two Osage citizens were found within a day of each other in 1921, both with gunshot wounds to their heads, it became clear that someone was continuing an American tradition of genocide on a personal level.

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Most of all, Hale says, Ernest should get to know as much about the Osage as he can. “They are the most beautiful people in the world,” he says, before the movie abruptly cuts to a Native American having a violent seizure on a wooden apartment floor. A series of deaths, all of them involving healthy Osage locals who suddenly fall ill or fall victim to outright murder — and most of them accompanied by a voice saying “No investigation” — play out. Then we meet the woman narrating this homicide montage: Mollie Kyle (Gladstone). Her family owns one of the tribal land headrights that’s kept the money coming in to town. Ernest ends up becoming her driver, partially out of circumstance, and then her sweetheart, initially because his uncle thinks getting in good with the Kyles would benefit him.

It’s Ernest’s two central relationships — between a husband and his wife, and between a malleable man and the surrogate father who becomes a devil on his shoulder — that define not just Killers of the Flower Moon ’s dynamic, but distinguish the movie from its source material. David Grann’s book ran parallel narratives, following both the timeline of these serial killings and the concurrent formation of a government-sanctioned “Bureau of Investigation” by J. Edgar Hoover; the Osage murders were one of the first major cases they took on, with a former Texas Ranger named Tom White chasing down leads. It was a detective story mixed with deep reportage on systematic racism that had been treated as a historical footnote. “When I began the story I was thinking, ‘It’s a whodunnit kind of thing, right?’” Grann noted upon the book’s publication. “And by the end, [it] was like, ‘Who didn’t do it?’”

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That’s what Scorsese is interested in — a love story tainted by greed, collusion, and a country built on prejudice-scorched earth, rather than a procedural — and that’s what DiCaprio and Gladstone give us. She’s the undisputed MVP of Killers, which is no easy feat when you’re up against two best-of-their-generation contenders. It’s hard to think of another working actor who knows how to use just the movement of their eyes to such good effect; a scene in which she sizes up DiCaprio before inviting him to silently contemplate a rainstorm next to her makes you think you’re seeing Dietrich one second, De Havilland the next. It helps that cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, another longtime Scorsese collaborator, knows exactly how to light her, but Gladstone is the one making the heavy lifting seem graceful. She turns Mollie into someone who doesn’t trust easily; who gives a man she knows to be good at heart her trust; and then watches it all turn to ash as he keeps giving her “medicine.” She gives this epic a broken-hearted pulse and its backbone.

Their doomed romance is also the throughline that guides Killers of the Flower Moon though a number of expository patches, cultural anthropology, bonus genre detours (black comedy, courtroom thriller, Freudian family drama), and a lot of covered historical and sociological ground. Scorsese is after big game here, and like The Irishman , this range noir writ large justifies its length. What sticks with you, though, is not the film’s hugeness but its humanity. It ends not on a moment of mournfulness and opts, instead, for a closing image that suggests survival, endurance, a ritual of affirmation. No one makes movies like this anymore, that go for broke yet keeps its eyes on the universal experiences of love, death, healing, and forgiveness. Maybe no one else can. But we’ve got a truly masterful example of how to do it, from an artist who hasn’t given up on the power of the moving pictures as mass-appeal empathy machines. Cinema’s not dead yet.

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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

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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’ review: leonardo dicaprio and lily gladstone lead martin scorsese’s searing true-crime epic.

Robert De Niro also stars in the adaptation of David Grann’s book about the Osage Murders, with a supporting cast that includes Jesse Plemons, John Lithgow and Brendan Fraser.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Following the superbly crafted film’s Out of Competition Cannes premiere, Apple is planning a fall release (Oct. 6 limited, Oct. 20 wide) in partnership with Paramount ahead of its streaming premiere on Apple TV+, for which a date has not yet been set. That theatrical positioning seems ideal for a powerful drama that should figure notably among the year-end prestige crop.

Money and violence have been prominent themes in Scorsese’s filmography and for every facile charge ever lobbed at him of glorifying or glamorizing career criminals, he has usually delivered retribution to his antiheroes. But there’s a different, more chilling feel to the reign of terror depicted here, a trail of slaughter that weighs heavily on the heart and mind at every step. There’s also a suggestion of a filmmaker reflecting on guilt and atonement, a notion strengthened by a strategic — and unexpectedly moving — cameo from the director.

The severity of the killings is amplified by the contempt shown for the humanity of a deeply spiritual Indigenous American people, but also by the hypocrisy of the chief orchestrator of the precision-targeted, one-by-one genocide.

As good as those frequent Scorsese collaborators are, however, the revelation for many will be the wondrous Lily Gladstone as Mollie Kyle, the woman unfortunate enough to marry gold-digger Ernest. Many of us have been waiting impatiently for Gladstone to land a substantial part since her piercingly sensitive work as a lonely ranch hand in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women . And it’s taken a director frequently criticized for his scarcity of fully dimensional female characters not only to provide one but to make her the wounded heart of the movie.

A strikingly direct woman surrounded by deceitful men, Gladstone’s Mollie conveys as much with her expressive eyes or the subtle shifts of her mouth as she does with words. She’s transfixing in her self-possessed dignity and alert intelligence as much as her encroaching sorrow, or her physical agony when amoral conspirators and her gullible husband push her to the brink of death.

The degree to which Scorsese seems revitalized by this material can be seen in the brisk backgrounding that opens the film. The solemnity of an Osage burial ceremony at the end of the 19th century gives way to a jubilant explosion when oil gushes from the cracked earth, and young tribesmen hurl themselves in slow-motion into the air, getting showered in black sludge to the electrifying sounds of Robbie Robertson’s century-spanning rootsy rock score.

By the time Ernest arrives in Fairfax in the early ‘20s, the government has begun policing the flow of money by deeming some Osage “incompetent,” assigning them a white “guardian” with the authority to approve or deny spending.

Mollie, one of four sisters, who takes care of their aging mother, Lizzie (Tantoo Cardinal), endures that financial oversight with silently disdainful stoicism. But her full-blood family’s “headrights” over oil-rich tribal lands make her crucial to Hale’s plans. He puts his nephew to work for his cab company and when Ernest starts driving Mollie to and from town, a mutual attraction quickly develops between them.

Ernest makes no secret of his indolent nature, his love of money and whiskey, and while she calls him a coyote, Mollie is charmed by him. When Hale plants the idea that marrying her would be a “smart investment,” Ernest wastes no time proposing. He’s merely one of the countless white men who come “circling like buzzards” around easy money with what now seems like astonishing brazenness.

Hale points out the importance of channeling the estate of his nephew’s wife back to them. He explains that Lizzie is sickly and Mollie’s sister Anna (Cara Jade Myers), who has been sexually involved with Ernest’s reptilian brother Bryan (Scott Shepherd), is a boozing good-time gal whose mouth and the pistol she packs in her purse inevitably will get her into trouble. That leaves only Mollie and another sister, Rita (Janae Collins), standing between them and the family’s oil wealth.

The intricacy of Hale’s planning and the ruthlessness with which he enlists his nephews and assorted lowlifes to do his dirty work is breathtaking in the most sinister way. He even has those scoundrels who might be inclined to talk iced to cover any trail back to him, all the while keeping his hands clean as a pillar of the community. Only later does he get sloppy, fuming when an insurance company balks at honoring a policy he took out on a vulnerable Osage “friend.” But even then, the town’s authority figures are either too corrupt or too indifferent to ask questions.

Where audiences familiar with the book might feel shortchanged is in the truncation of the chapters chronicling the birth of the FBI. Playing federal agent Tom White, who was dispatched by J. Edgar Hoover to lead the investigation after the Osage Tribal Council petitioned Washington to address the murders, fourth-billed Jesse Plemons only turns up in the final hour. Likewise, John Lithgow and a miscast Brendan Fraser as attorneys for the prosecution and defense, respectively, when the case goes to trial.

But without taking the limited series route, Scorsese and Roth make necessary choices in focusing on the steady buildup of treachery and dissemination of fear, planting a sense of horrified indignation that keeps you riveted throughout. Our investment in Mollie and the devastating losses she suffers makes the stakes in the courtroom scenes more tangible, with suspense expertly measured out in the haunting drumbeats of Robertson’s score.

All three leads are excellent, but it’s especially worth noting the complexity of what DiCaprio pulls off. Initially, Ernest seems a fairly standard character type, the cocky, dim-bulb guy of disposable moral fiber, easily influenced by someone much smarter. But he becomes more interesting as the anguish caused by his love for Mollie eats away at him, with the actor looking discernibly more haggard as Hale’s plot advances and he’s unable to extricate himself from it.

Indigenous Canadian veteran Cardinal is stirring as the mother appalled that her daughters keep marrying white men and thinning the bloodline. New York stage regulars Shepherd and Louis Cancelmi make slippery villains, the latter blithely acknowledging his intention to sacrifice children for material gain. (He also does some completely wild clog dancing at Ernest and Mollie’s wedding.)

Southern rocker Jason Isbell makes an impression as creepy opportunist Bill Smith, who’s barely been widowed a minute after Minnie’s death when he gets hitched to Rita, but then makes the mistake of rubbing Ernest the wrong way in a tense exchange. And Jack White makes a brief appearance as an actor in a true-crime radio show about the murders, complete with studio orchestra and foley artists.

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

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Killers of the Flower Moon review – Scorsese’s magnificent period epic is an instant American classic

Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro star in a sinuous, pitch-black tragedy about how the west was really won

F ate has smiled on the Osage Indian nation, out in Oklahoma. The reservation sits on an oasis of black gold; the First Nation people have become oil multimillionaires. They bump along the dirt roads in chauffeur-driven Buicks, play golf on the grassland and take private planes for a spin.

But this newfound fortune brings danger; they want to watch out they’re not killed. The history of the west, after all, is one of exploitation and slaughter.

The 1920s Osage murders provided the spark for David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction bestseller, which lifted the lid on hundreds of unexplained deaths. Now Grann’s book forms the basis for Martin Scorsese’s magnificent period epic, a saga of industrialised gangsterism in America’s wide open spaces, forcefully played by Leonardo DiCaprio , Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone.

This is Scorsese’s first picture at the Cannes film festival since 1985’s After Hours. 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 (De Niro), furnishes him with all three. Hale is a cattle baron and therefore already rich.

But one fortune’s not enough – perhaps it never quite is – and so he steers Ernest towards Mollie (Lily Gladstone), who holds the “headrights” to the oil deposits on her land. If Ernest marries Mollie, then he and Hale promptly gain control of the estate. What Mollie gets from the arrangement is more open to question.

“Coyote wants money,” smiles Mollie, rumbling Ernest’s game right away. But Scorsese effectively shows that her position is tenuous and how, despite their riches, the Osage know that they need to keep their white patrons on side. Also, Mollie is diabetic and needs regular doses of insulin. Osage women, Hale explains kindly, never seem to live to a ripe old age.

De Niro’s on powerhouse form as big Uncle Bill Hale, a man who combines the folksy authority of Lyndon Johnson with the steely twinkle of Bill Cosby. It’s a performance so potent that it might have unbalanced a lesser movie.

Scorsese, though, simply makes it part of the mix, another instrument in a mighty orchestra, complemented by DiCaprio, Gladstone and Jesse Plemons as a foursquare federal investigator. Killers of the Flower Moon is monumentally long (206 minutes) and moves at an unhurried pace, but it knows where it’s going and barely a second is wasted. It’s sinuous and old-school, an instant American classic; almost Steinbeckian in its attention to detail and its banked, righteous rage.

No man, obviously, regards himself as a monster. Even those who play God claim to do it out of love. And so it is with Bill Hale, who purports to care deeply for the Osage, even as they struggle with alcoholism and depression and the theft of their tribal lands; even as the bodies appear to be piling up by the day.

“I love them, but in the turning of the earth, they’re gone,” he sighs, at the point in the film when the storm clouds start massing. Their time is over, he believes, while his is just beginning.

The realisation that the fossil fuel underfoot is made of so much rotting matter only adds to the sense that Scorsese is weaving an alternative American creation myth here.

Killers of the Flower Moon plays out as a muscular, pitch-black tragedy about how the west was really won, recasting Eden as a barren grassland where the only fruit is crude oil and the blood on the ground plants the seeds for the future.

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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
• 1.3K User reviews
• 365 Critic reviews
• 89 Metascore
• 125 wins & 400 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 …

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• 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

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• October 20, 2023 (United States)
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• $200,000,000 (estimated)
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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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Killers Of The Flower Moon Review

20 Oct 2023

Killers Of The Flower Moon

In a heartbreaking recent interview, Martin Scorsese lamented his advancing years. Quoting Akira Kurosawa, he said, “I’m only now beginning to see the possibility of what cinema could be — and it’s too late.” Thank the gods of cinema, then, that he still found time for Killers Of The Flower Moon : a piece of work as strong and sharp and vivid as anything in his remarkable career, and perhaps one he could have made only now. How many octogenarians can honestly claim to still be working at the peak of their powers, as he so evidently is?

This, his 26th feature, seems at initial glance outside his usual scope: set far beyond the borders of his beloved native New York, it is effectively his first Western, albeit a deeply revisionist one, a story of genocide and bloodshed on the last frontier. And yet it is also deeply Scorsesian, if that word means anything. His lifelong preoccupations — criminal conspiracies, violence and its provenance, the founding myths of America, fatally flawed men — are all here. Echoes of his entire filmography flicker in and out, from Mean Streets to GoodFellas to The Irishman . (There is, effectively, the 1930s equivalent of helicopters circling above Henry Hill’s house in the third act.)

De Niro is brutally effective here, dooming a life with a single eyebrow twitch.

Adapting the extraordinary non-fiction book of the same name by David Grann (while wisely swerving away from the book’s focus on the FBI’s early days), Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth craft a riveting crime thriller, a genuinely epic story that zips along until, somehow, three- and-a-half hours have passed by in an instant.

A prologue establishes the Osage Nation as “the chosen people of chance”: forcibly moved onto land that turns out to be oil-rich, leaving them the wealthiest people on earth, per capita. But resentment and racial tensions quickly fester on the reservation, the spectre of white supremacy still haunting. Into this oily goldrush arrives Ernest Burkhart ( Leonardo DiCaprio ), a World War I veteran with little intellect or prospects but plenty of ambition. DiCaprio, approaching his sixth decade, cuts a pathetically childlike figure here, brilliantly twisting his features into slack-jawed stupidity. (“I can read, sir,” he says defensively at one point.)

Guided by the firm hand of Ernest’s uncle, Bill ‘King’ Hale (a regal Robert De Niro ) — perhaps the most sinister character ever to wear driving goggles — a plot thickens. Outwardly, Hale is a friend to the Osage people; privately, he speaks in white-nationalist terms (“You have to take back control of your home”) and conspires to gain their lucrative oil headrights, through marriage, and then murder.

Gladstone’s enigmatic smile, and her soul-shattering anxiety, never feel far away.

De Niro is brutally effective here, dooming a life with a single eyebrow twitch, and it is a true treat to see Scorsese’s two great muses spark off each other. Yet perhaps the most compelling performance comes from Lily Gladstone, as Ernest’s love interest Mollie , an Osage woman whose family begin to die in increasingly suspicious circumstances. Gladstone, who so impressed in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women , gives a turn of astounding restraint and often devastating quiet.

Mollie sees right through Ernest’s wooing from the off, as a “coyote who wants money”, but against her better judgement, and despite his terrible chat-up lines (“You got nice-coloured skin!”), a genuine romance soon blossoms. For all the slow-burn bombast of the deadly criminal enterprise — and the film looks every penny of its reported $200 million budget, with gorgeous work from Barbie cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto — it’s this intimate relationship, in all its strange contradictions and ambiguity, that is at its core. Even when Mollie is seemingly sidelined, numbed by a mysterious illness, her presence is felt. Gladstone’s enigmatic smile, and her soul-shattering anxiety, never feel far away.

After such an expansive, sprawling, hours-long build-up, Scorsese ends things abruptly, with an epilogue that could feel almost flippant. Yet he is shifting the focus onto himself and his role in the story, acknowledging the artifice of the ‘true-crime’ tradition, and respectfully leaving the final word to the people for whom the footprint of these murders is still felt. It is a moment of true grace, from a filmmaker who seems, in his own mind, to have finally reached artistic maturity. And he’s not done yet.

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

Scorsese's latest tells a gripping and horrific story of America's past.

This review was originally part of our coverage for the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

The Big Picture

• Killers of the Flower Moon avoids common stereotypes by showing the story from multiple perspectives, including that of a member of the Osage nation.
• The film's runtime of 206 minutes feels necessary to tell the devastating true story of the murder of Osage people by those seeking their wealth and land.
• While the performances by DiCaprio, De Niro, and Gladstone are solid, the film falls short in providing a comprehensive portrayal of the Osage story.

When it comes to stories about the decimation of the Indigenous people of America, few do the story justice. Many focus on the violence and pain of the victims, turning their suffering into entertainment. Some prefer to focus on the white characters while relegating the Native Americans to supporting characters. On some level, Killers of the Flower Moon avoids a lot of these stereotypes . Director Martin Scorsese is careful in showing the story from multiple perspectives, including from the perspective of Lily Gladstone 's Mollie, who is a member of the Osage nation.

'Killers of the Flower Moon' Looks at a Series of Gruesome Murders in 1920s Oklahoma

Killers , based on a non-fiction book by David Grann , tells the devastating true story of the murder of Osage people by people who are intent on taking their wealth and their land through inheritance . The film centers around Ernest Burkhart, played by Leonardo DiCaprio , who has just returned from World War I to his uncle's ranch in Oklahoma. His uncle William "Bill" Hale ( Robert De Niro ) acts as a sort of "godfather" figure in the town of Fairfax — he literally tells people to call him 'King'. He wields a large amount of power and on the surface seems to be an advocate for the Osage people. He speaks their language, he appears to respect them, and he often talks about how friendly he is with them.

But beneath that jovial and generous facade is a cruel, greedy, and power-hungry man . It doesn't take long for Ernest, and the audience, to put together how involved Bill is in the string of murders plaguing the area. After striking rich with the oil on their land, the Osage nation became populated with some of the richest people in the country. The Osage managed to keep a hold of their land making them wealthy but also targets of men like Bill. It's common practice for white men to marry Osage women and conveniently become their inheritors when their wife turns up dead. There's no investigation and no questions.

Bill has his eye set on a big prize. Mollie Kyle, a daughter set to inherit a large parcel of land and money once her mother dies. He talks Ernest into befriending Mollie, and soon the two hit it off and get married. Ernest, for his part, is somewhat dimwitted. He proudly proclaims that he loves money, but is often conflicted when his uncle makes him do his bidding. It might be easy to say that Ernest, at his core, is a good man. But the film begs the question, just how much blood can you have on your hands and still be absolved of your crimes and be forgiven ?

'Killers of the Flower Moon': Release Date, Cast, Trailer, and Everything We Know About Martin Scorsese's Next Film

'killers' runtime is almost justified.

The film clocks in at 206 minutes, just three minutes shorter than The Irishman , and Killers of the Flower Moon earns its runtime . It's long, but it feels necessary when telling a story of this magnitude. The pacing of the film changes in the third act, slowing down and often feeling lethargic, when the film introduces new players into the game in the form of Federal agents. It's here that I have some reservations about Killers that mostly stems from the source material. David Grann's original novel certainly glamorizes the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover, a man who history has shown to be a polarizing figure. Yes, the federal government conducted an investigation on these murders, but only after over a dozen deaths, being paid a hefty amount from the Osage nation, and forcing the nation's leaders to travel to Washington D.C. If the film has a hero, it portrays the feds, specifically Jesse Plemons ' Tom White as one of its saviors.

In a film that opens with a vignette of a wild and unlawful land full of violence, corruption, and greed, it seems rather one-dimensional to have the government swooping in like heroes. After all, it's only because of that government that Native Americans are relegated to Indian reservations. These governments are formed by the same people who stole their land, colonized their people, and erased their culture. For the most part, the people in town are open about their prejudice against the Indigenous people. Men openly court Native women who suspiciously end up dead a few years later, fueled by their own white rage and manifest destiny mentality. Scorsese isn't shy about showing just how cruel these people are, and how easily they dehumanize Native Americans .

Is Martin Scorsese the Right Person to Direct a Story Like This?

But, I still have to wonder. Is Martin Scorsese the director to tell this story about an attempt at total annihilation ? The film centers, like so many before it, around a white protagonist. Ernest is undoubtedly our point-of-view character with Bill acting as his foil. It's hard to sympathize with someone who is content to kill the people closest to his wife in pursuit of money, no matter how conflicted or loving he may appear. It is Ernest's guilt that we are faced with. Mollie, like so many other Native American characters, is written as a woman who must suffer continuously.

I have to wonder how this story would have been written and directed in the hands of a Native American filmmaker . It certainly wouldn't have focused so much of the runtime on Ernest and Bill. The other Indigenous characters beyond Mollie don't have distinct personalities or true development. It's a disappointing aspect of Killers that sticks out after sitting through the full 206 minutes.

The Performances by DiCaprio, De Niro, and Gladstone Are Solid

While I question some decisions Scorsese made with Killers , there's no doubt that this film is a triumph for its leading cast . DiCaprio plays Ernest with the full measure of his weaknesses. The character is inconsistent and frustrating, but DiCaprio certainly is not. He turns a character who should be despicable into one that is almost sympathetic. On the flip side, De Niro's Bill is so perfectly slimy, an avaricious and calculating villain. He embodies the type of person who openly embeds himself into the Osage culture to seem non-threatening, becoming a respected member of their community. He seems the type to say, "I'm not racist, I have so many Osage friends!" De Niro plays him with all the delicious menace that's necessary.

But it's Gladstone's performance as Mollie that really takes the cake. An unflinching woman who is strong-willed and enigmatic, Gladstone makes the most of her character , conveying all the agony and strength that is required of someone who is almost constantly mourning . I often found myself wishing we had much more of her story as opposed to Ernest's or Bill's. Although initially we are following Ernest's story, it quickly becomes obvious that Mollie is who we should be rooting for. Gladstone, who has received numerous accolades and much deserved praise, is able to capture the subtleties of Mollie's expressions, which are never drastic, and each look she delivers conveys feelings louder than any words. Mollie is our beacon of hope as we slowly spiral deeper into the misdeeds and crimes committed on the Osage by characters like Bill. We watch as she becomes impassioned about protecting her people, going to Washington, D.C. even when she is sick, in order to plead for the federal government to finally step in.

Other performances by the likes of Brendan Fraser and John Lithgow appear only briefly as characters with no real development or depth. Still, Fraser and Lithgow both have enough power and presence to command a scene no matter the situation .

'Killers of the Flower Moon' Is Worthy of a Watch For Scorsese Fans, but It Doesn't Tell a Comprehensive Story

Ultimately, Killers of the Flower Moon doesn't break ground . It's not a life-changing film, nor is it Scorsese's crowning achievement. But it is a dedicated study of a horrific time in history and one that tries its best to present a balanced story. To Scorsese's credit, he does not shy away from the injustice of the story. Even in the end, he is right to inform us that even when there is justice, there still is no justice for marginalized groups of people.

In the time since I first watched Scorsese's film at the Cannes Film Festival , my feelings have continued to be conflicted on where I fall with Killers of the Flower Moon . It's clear from most of the Indigenous people who worked on this film that Scorsese worked hard to make sure that their story was told. Gladstone herself said at a press conference for the film at Cannes, "Who else is going to challenge people to challenge their own complicity in white supremacy with such a platform as this man here?" At that same press conference, Osage leader Chief Standing Bear gave his support to Scorsese, saying, "Martin Scorsese and his team have restored trust and we know that trust will not be betrayed."

Still, Christopher Cote , the Osage language consultant on the film, stated to The Hollywood Reporter in his interview at the film's premiere , "This film isn't made for an Osage audience, it was made for everybody not Osage." And Cote is right as well. It is clear that Scorsese won the trust and the respect of the Osage people that he worked with and endeavored to tell a complicated story, but this shouldn't be the beginning and end of telling the Osage story. Instead, Scorsese's film can act as a springboard for Native and Indigenous creators to get their stories to mainstream audiences , because at the end of the day, we don't need any more stories about the Ernest Burkharts and Tom Whites of the world. We need more stories about Mollie.

Bolstered by a strong cast and a luscious color palette and landscape, Killers of the Flower Moon is worthy of a watch for those who can look past its romanticization. For those looking for a film that puts Native American voices and characters on center stage or a more comprehensive story, continue moving on; even with three-and-a-half hours, this is not that film.

Killers of the Flower Moon

Killers of the Flower Moon tells a vivid story of a tragic and violent time, though it is not a balanced telling of the 1920s Osage murders, the lead performances are worthy of praise.

• Performances are fantastic, with Lily Gladstone standing out the most as Mollie Burkhart.
• The runtime is long but it is earned due to the magnitude of the story.
• The story does not cover the Osage point of view and focuses too much on Ernest.
• The glorification of the federal government contradicts the fact that they are part of the problem.

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

WATCH ON APPLE TV+

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Killers of the flower moon, common sense media reviewers.

Masterful American epic about greed, violence, and racism.

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

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…

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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• Parents say (8)
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Based on 8 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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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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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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Film Review – Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Four years ago, Avengers: Endgame was settling in nicely as the biggest film of all time, breaking box office records across the world and showcasing the strength and validity of the superhero genre, one that seemed to show no signs of slowing down. Four years ago, on the eve of the release of The Irishman, Martin Scorsese stated his displeasure with the state of modern cinema, predicting that “theme park” films would soon cause the death of the type of filmmaking the auteur had himself been part of revolutionising since the 1970s. Ironically, in October 2023, not only does his latest opus, Killers of the Flower Moon , open in cinemas but it’s three days removed from the fictional date when Tony Stark would snap his fingers and eradicate Thanos from existence. Funny old thing, timing.

A pandemic later and the state of cinema is still up for debate: superheroes are starting to wain, adult-orientated works are still struggling to find audiences and the continued SAG-AFTRA strike has led to an air of real uncertainty about our relationships with film and big-screen experiences. Barbenheimer may have helped turn the tide during the summer and Taylor Swift of all people has helped salvage something from the box-office wasteland as actors continue to picket, but Scorsese’s comments still bring up many points that lend themselves to his film: can a 3 ½ hour film about the Osage murders help re-energise the moviegoing experience? For us, it’s a no-brainer.

There’s always excitement when the veteran director, now fifty years deep in his filmography, returns to offer us his latest bounty but Killers of the Flower Moon, a passion project for Scorsese, is a remarkable piece of work. Some may find a meandering, self-aggrandising film, but for us, it’s a showcase for everything the filmmaker has wrought over his 26 films thus far. Telling the story of the fortunes brought to the Osage Nation in Oklahoma after the discovery of vast amounts of oil, DiCaprio stars as Ernest Burkhart, an army veteran who returns hoping to work for his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro, superb as ever), seen by some as a knight in shining armour bringing industrial and scientific revolution to the county. The truth, however, is much more disturbing and after a spate of murders, which include the death of the three sisters of Mollie (Lily Gladstone, unreal and a shoo-in for Best Actress awards), who soon becomes Ernest’s wife, the tribes begin to suspect that the continued expansion of the white factions has much more sinister intentions.

From its superb opening that showcases not only Scorsese’s masterful storytelling prowess to Rodrigo Prieto’s sensational cinematography and Robbie Robertson’s light, piercing score (his final one before his sad passing), the stage is quickly set for what is about to unfold. Co-written by Eric Roth, the screenplay is riveting, the characters fully-fledged and the world purposeful whilst the narrative sits on a boiling point of tension, bubbling gently for the first half before it percolates and begins to boil as anger, resentment, power, and greed begin to puncture everything around the county until the pressure becomes unbearable and it explodes.

If there is a criticism of the film it’s the point of view that skews very much toward the white population rather than the natives who were the victims of the atrocities and, as such, does have a one-sided rather than a completely fair. This creates a slightly uneven because of it and the criticism of this thus far is valid, but it’s still hard to discount the film’s power and panache that bursts from the screen. It’s beautiful, brutal, bruising, ravishing cinema.

Drama, Thriller | 2023 | In cinemas October 20th | Paramount Pictures, Apple Original Films | Dir: Martin Scorsese | Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro, Lily Gladstone, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal,

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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.

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The Movie Moron, formally know as Couch Critics, is a movie review podcast hosted by Easton Moore and Co-Hosted by Trevor Landreth and our All Time Guest Tristen Moore! Every week the three, and maybe a special guest👀, discuss the biggest, or best, movie of the last weekend. A wide range of new and recurring guests help keep opinions fresh, different and add personal experiences to movie of the week. If you’re a movie lover who always leaves the theater itching to have a casual discussion over it we’ve got you covered every Monday with a new and exciting episode! Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/themoviemoron/support

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