By This Friday, Killers of the Flower Moon, a new movie by Martin Scorsese, opens in US theatres. The period drama, which sees the director reunited with two of his most regular collaborators, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, centers on a string of killings that took place in Oklahoma in the early 1920s among members of the Osage Native American community.
Killers of the Flower Moon has been praised as yet another one of Martin Scorsese’s masterpieces in a number of foreign film reviews. The New York Times reviewed the movie and referred to it as, “unsettling masterpiece,” stating, “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.”
According to the Independent’s assessment, the Osage community it depicts is just as much a part of the movie as its main characters and Martin’s muses. “Killers of the Flower Moon, despite the weighty presence of DiCaprio and De Niro, is ultimately framed around the perspective of the Osage Nation, who worked extensively on the production as consultants, craftsmen, and actors,” the review explains.
According to the Digital Spy review, the movie is lengthy (3 hours, 26 minutes), although it is “worth every minute.” It reads, “The filmmaker has managed to blend his style with a fresh point of view that never forgets who the victims are. In the end, he even offers a commentary on true crime and how the genre usually places entertainment above understanding.”
In a similar vein, Mashable’s review praised the conclusion, writing, “Scorsese isn’t just ushering us into the backrooms of the criminal world, he is exposing how the insidiousness of white supremacy in America makes all those who do nothing to actively fight it complicit in its evils.”
