What’s going to take home the Academy Award for Best Picture this year? A lot of people think it could be Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. The movie already won the New York Film Critics Circle’s award for Best Film, and just last night it took home the National Board of Review’s prize for Best Feature as well. NBR also gave Scorsese their Best Director prize, while the film’s female lead, Lily Gladstone, took home Best Actress.
If all that awards attention has you curious about the movie — or you were just a bit wary about sitting through a 3.5 hour film in the theater — now you can watch Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese’s latest masterpiece is available starting today on Apple TV+.
The film is based on the best-selling non-fiction book of the same name by David Grann, which chronicles a largely forgotten chapter of American history, the so-called “Reign of Terror” in Oklahoma in the 1920, in which several dozen members of the Osage Nation were killed or wound up dead under mysterious circumstances. The authorities did essentially nothing for months and months, because those in power stood to gain from the deaths because the Osage controlled the rights to unimaginable oil wealth and their systematic killing could allow some of that money to pass into the hands of the authorities.
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Finally the recently created Bureau of Investigation (which eventually became the FBI) sends an agent (Jesse Plemons) to investigate. Grann’s book spends a lot of time on the agent; his backstory and his working the case. Scorsese’s film takes a very different approach; the FBI is much less central to the story, which instead focuses on the extremely complicated relationship between a white man, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), and his Osage wife Mollie and (Lily Gladstone), whose family is among the key targets of the Reign of Terror.
The story and the full scope of Ernest and Mollie’s connection is fascinating and gives Killers of the Flower Moon a dimension rarely seen in more traditional true crime dramas. As I wrote in my review of the film…
Killers of the Flower Moon finds [Scorsese] (at 80!) just as feisty and daring as ever. The movie builds to a bold and surprising finale, one that is equally playful and melancholy — and almost a literal curtain call on the film, and perhaps Scorsese’s career. When one unexpected face appeared onscreen in that sequence to utter the movie’s last lines I burst into tears; not only because of the magnitude of the story I had just witnessed, but also out of gratitude for all of the films this great director has made across half a century.
Killers of the Flower Moon is now streaming on Apple TV+. It is instantly the best film available on the service.
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