Metacritic reviews

This is an utterly absorbing film, a story that Scorsese sees as a secret history of American power, a hidden violence epidemic polluting the water table of humanity.

The three-and-a-half-hour running time is fully justified in an escalating tragedy that never loosens its grip — a sordid illustration of historical erasure with echoes in today’s bitterly divisive political gamesmanship.

Weaving the Tulsa race riots, the KKK and the Masons into its tapestry, Scorsese’s opus questions the misdeeds of America in the last century while linking them to the pressing issues of today. Addressing racial violence, nationalism, the continued epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and even our lurid obsession with true crime, Killers of the Flower Moon paints a robust picture of a moment in history that invites viewer introspection.

On paper, this looks like a flatly impossible task for DiCaprio: the film’s central character is neither hero nor charismatic outlaw, but a grasping, biddable, determinedly unreflective stooge, whose actions inspire revulsion and outrage.But he meets the challenge with one of the finest, most complex performances he’s ever given.

DiCaprio and De Niro are brilliant, but it is relative unknown Lily Gladstone who is truly extraordinary.

Lifting his camera to survey the wide open plains of the past, Scorsese extracts an epic Western from horrible real-life crimes committed against the Native American Osage tribe of, latterly, Oklahoma, delivering something biblical, human, yet deeply inhumane.

Killers of the Flower Moon is vast and vital in its scale, purpose and emotional scope, a Western-thriller and ensemble piece that is every bit a Scorsese crime picture as one can dare to imagine.

It’s a difficult balancing act for a filmmaker as gifted and operatic as Scorsese, whose ability to tell any story rubs up against his ultimate admission that this might not be his story to tell. And so, for better or worse, Scorsese turns Killers of the Flower Moon into the kind of story that he can still tell better than anyone else: A story about greed, corruption, and the mottled soul of a country that was born from the belief that it belonged to anyone callous enough to take it.

If “Killers” miscalibrates its balance of perspectives, it also discovers, in the luminous recesses of Gladstone’s performance, a quality of contemplation that beautifully suffuses and modulates Scorsese’s faster, more frenetic rhythms.

Stylistically, this feels like a young man’s movie. It’s engrossing from the get-go, the palpable tension methodically echoed by Robbie Robertson’s steady-heartbeat score. But it keeps going and going until everyone we care about is dead, dying or behind bars, with nearly an hour still in store.