Killers of the Flower Moon Review

Scorsese's central decision is to refuse the investigation narrative: we know who is doing the killing inside twenty minutes, so the film becomes an endurance test of complicity, watching Ernest Burkhart administer insulin he knows is poisoned and keep telling himself he loves his wife. Lily Gladstone holds the picture together with stillness, playing Mollie as a woman whose intelligence is never in doubt and whose options narrow scene by scene; the shot of her sitting up in bed listening to the house is the whole argument.

Robert De Niro's Hale is banal on purpose, a genial civic booster arranging murders over lunch. Rodrigo Prieto shoots 1920s Oklahoma in oil black and prairie gold. The cost is pacing: at 206 minutes the middle act circles, the murders accumulate without escalation, and DiCaprio's Ernest is written as too dim to carry three hours of interiority. The radio-play epilogue is a startling, self-implicating move. Major work that would be greater at two and a half hours.