Martin Scorsese’s highly anticipated Killers of the Flower Moon, which released its first trailer this week, just had its world premiere at Cannes. Easily the most anticipated movie of the festival, all eyes were on the post-screening reactions, and folks were curious to know if the film stands alongside the eighty-year-old auteur’s best movies. Indeed, judging by the rapturous response (which included a nine-minute standing ovation), it’s safe to say that Killers of the Flower Moon is going to rank with some of Marty’s finest work. So far, the Rotten Tomatoes score is 96%, with only one of the 27 reviews being negative.
The film, which is based on David Grann’s non-fiction book of the same name, centers around a series of murders that took place in Oklahoma during the 1920s. The victims were all members of the Osage Native American Tribe, with the plot an attempt by a rancher named William Hale (Robert De Niro) to obtain oil rights, with the help of his nephew, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), who was married to Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), herself a member of the tribe whose family members were murdered by Hale and his associates.
Scorsese’s film is said to largely center around Gladstone’s performance, with her already being tipped for a potential best actress Academy Award, with THR noting, “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.”
Leonardo DiCaprio also seems like a shoe-in for a potential Best Actor nomination, with several critics saying that the actor’s against-type role is a stunning showcase. IndieWire notes that the film contains “the best performance of Leonardo DiCaprio’s entire career… His nuanced and uncompromising turn as the cretinous Ernest Burkhart mines new wonders from the actor’s long-standing lack of vanity.”
THR also notes that some may be put off by the fact that Scorsese opts not to focus too much on the FBI investigation of the murders, with it being mentioned that Jesse Plemons, who plays real-life FBI agent Tom White, only becomes prominent in the last hour. Other big-name actors like John Lithgow and Brendan Fraser are said to only have small roles, but the same critics also note that focusing the narrative on the Burkharts was the right move.
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