DiCaprio Is the Star, but She Is a 'Revelation'

One of the most highly anticipated movies in a while is out, and Killers of the Flower Moon was apparently worth the wait. Director Martin Scorsese reunites with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro to tell the story of the 1920s murders of members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. As of Friday afternoon, it had a strong 93% "fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Some samples:

• The headline of the review by Manohla Dargis in the New York Times refers to an "unsettling masterpiece." She sees "emotion in every camera move" by the director. "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."

• "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," writes Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com. However, he adds that Lily Gladstone, who plays an Osage woman, "will be the revelation for most people."
• At the Seattle Times, Moira Macdonald seconds the above about Gladstone. "If there is a flaw in this masterful film, it's that Gladstone's Mollie is a secondary character to DiCaprio's Ernest," she writes. It's a "star turn" for her, a performance in which she "can tell an entire story in a knowing gaze or a flirtatious giggle (she lets out just one, and it's perfect), and whose Mollie is the film's brave heart."
• Not all the reviews are glowing. Anthony Lane of the New Yorker complains of the film that "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." Nor was he wowed by its star: "I would love to report that DiCaprio is rejuvenated by Killers of the Flower Moon. Sadly not."

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