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Martin Scorsese’s movies consistently tower — can automatically make, regardless of their personal resonance, even the best movies you’ve seen the year of his latest release temporarily shrink into something insignificant-feeling by comparison. Killers of the Flower Moon, his much-delayed first dramatic feature since his 2019 masterpiece The Irishman, is imposing even before you’ve seen it, with its promises of a three-and-a-half-hour runtime and a grave subject matter — a series of murders committed by shamelessly greedy whites of Osage people in Oklahoma in the 1920s after the discovery of oil on tribal land — guiding it.

The movie adapts an assiduously reported 2017 book by David Grann. Worried his original draft was overwhelmingly “about all the white guys,” Scorsese rejiggered his original script to recenter dramatic focus from the BOI agent, Tom White (played in the film by a predictably very good Jesse Plemons), who eventually solved the case, onto a marriage. A white guy remains at the center of the movie — he’s a World War I veteran with a debilitatingly warped “gut” and perpetually scowling bulldog mug named Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) — and he weds soon into the film an Osage woman named Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) who has oil money attached to her family name.

Read the full review on the 425 website.