Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
When oil is discovered in 1920s Oklahoma under Osage Nation land, the Osage people are murdered one by one—until the FBI steps in to unravel the mystery.
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23 films that influenced Killers of the Flower Moon
What critics say influenced Killers of the Flower Moon
Killers of the Flower Moon is a three-hander on an epic canvas, a corrosive analysis of America’s colonialist and capitalist excesses as refracted through a marital melodrama in the vein of George Cukor’s Gaslight or Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion. As those artists did in those films, Scorsese cultivates a spellbinding air of uncertainty, even though it’s clear from the moment Ernest courts Mollie at his uncle’s insistence that little good will come from their pairing.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a three-hander on an epic canvas, a corrosive analysis of America’s colonialist and capitalist excesses as refracted through a marital melodrama in the vein of George Cukor’s Gaslight or Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion. As those artists did in those films, Scorsese cultivates a spellbinding air of uncertainty, even though it’s clear from the moment Ernest courts Mollie at his uncle’s insistence that little good will come from their pairing.
Apart from the sociological and history lesson within the film, upon exiting the theater I was probably most struck by its modern update on the more general parable of how greed corrupts the human soul, particularly for people who come from a lower economic background; much in the way that Erich von Stroheim's 1924 silent film masterpiece Greed did in 1924.
It's a pulse-pounding gaslighting scenario right out of Hitchcock—specifically, 1946's Notorious—and yet instead of playing it for pastiche, Scorsese opts for an agonizing realism that does not preclude two terrible possibilities.
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…the type of movie that made names out of fellow legends of cinemas like Sergio Leone and John Ford (whose 1956 film The Searchers is on record as being among Scorsese’s all-time favourites).
Scorsese begins the film as an ‘End of the West’ western, somewhere between Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and George Stevens’ Giant. White America is a criminal enterprise and Hale’s activities are just a more brutal version of that: a criminal enterprise on top of a criminal enterprise.
No less an icon than Jimmy Stewart played a composite version of White in 1959's The FBI Story, which was effectively endorsed by Hoover.
Set in the 1920s, Killers Of The Flower Moon is of John Huston scope, with some of the edge of a Chinatown.
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…in Malick’s majestic Pocahontas riff, The New World, he turned the settl…
These moments of serenity act as punctuation for the otherwise drab and brutal brown palettes reminiscent of McCabe and Mrs. Miller or, in its more lyrical moments, Days of Heaven (some of the movie was even filmed in Terence Malick's childhood hometown of Bartlesville).
Scorsese begins the film as an ‘End of the West’ western, somewhere between Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and George Stevens’ Giant. White America is a criminal enterprise and Hale’s activities are just a more brutal version of that: a criminal enterprise on top of a criminal enterprise.