Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Killers of the Flower Moon is Scorsese at his most sober and devastating: a grand American crime story that isn’t content to entertain, but insists you feel the human cost of greed dressed up as respectability. The film moves with a slow, tightening dread as the Osage murders mount, and the craftsmanship—its period detail, patient pacing, and ominous sense of inevitability—makes the history feel frighteningly alive rather than safely “in the past.” Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro turn charisma into something poisonous, while Lily Gladstone anchors the movie with a quiet, piercing strength that lingers long after the credits. It’s long and unflinching, and the violence is disturbing, but if you can meet it on its terms, it’s one of the most gripping and morally serious films of the decade.

Killers of the Flower Moon is clearly aiming to be a sober, morally furious reckoning with the Osage murders, and Scorsese brings the craft, period detail, and grim inevitability you’d expect. The catch is that it’s very long and deliberately paced, spending a lot of time in repetitive dread and procedural churn, and the structure can feel more exhausting than enlightening if you’re not fully locked in. DiCaprio and De Niro are compelling in a cold, transactional way, while Lily Gladstone gives the film its emotional center, but the focus often sits with the perpetrators’ machinery rather than the victims’ perspective. If you want a tight true-crime mystery or a brisk historical thriller, this may test your patience; if you can handle a punishing runtime for a meticulously made, angering tragedy, it delivers.