Killers of the Flower Moon, 8/10
This is Martin Scorsese's latest about a string of murders in the wealthy native Osage county in the 1920s. It's basically a crime-conspiracy drama seen through the eyes of the conspirators: Leonardo DiCaprio plays a man, who I'd say is too stupid to have a conscience, ending up serving his uncle, a local robber baron, who's seeking to hoover up all the wealth of the local native families for himself. He aims to do this by having his relatives marry their daughters, and then having said daughters and family members killed off so he can inherit their fortune. This is not a spoiler, this is all laid out in the first half hour of the film.
As expected of Scorsese, it's very very good. Despite the runtime and slow pace, I was never once bored or uninvested. It's like a bit leather chair of a film you can just sink into and get lost in. It's clearly a deeply personal film for Scorsese due to the massive 200+ min runtime, but also the fact that Scorsese himself turns up as a small, but vital cameo at the very end. It has slow, very deliberate pacing and pulls no punches in showing the horror and sorrow these men put the community through in their greed. It's a movie that's delibrately frustrating the audience by showing these absolute monsters get away with horrible things time and time again, and having DiCaprio's character be one of the most singulary r3tard3d main characters to come along in a while.
Robert DeNiro is the show stealer here, playing basically the ultimate pure evil greedy white man role, and I have a feeling there's bound to be Oscar buzz for his performance. In almost every scene he's in you get a sense that he could shoot anyone in the room in the head in the blink of an eye and not even flinch. Not that the rest are slouches either: DiCaprio is on top form (even if it's still hard to separate the actor from the character), and Lily Gladstone gives a stellar, understated performance as the heart and humanity amidst all the greed and amorality. You really get a sense of her pain and denial as even when horrible things happening all around and to her, she still loves her stupid, stupid husband dearly.
The foremost word I'd use for this movie is "sinister". Almost every scene in the first two thirds of this movie is weighed by an undercurrent of tension, distrust and dread: everyone's hiding something, everyone's got ulterior motives, everyone's trying to fuck someone over. The bass and harmonica -driven, very minimalist soundtrack punctuates the atmosphere perfectly, and the matter of fact-ness of the proceedings only serves to drive home how utterly uncaring these people were. In the last third the movie decidedly switches gears and becomes very different, but I won't spoil in what way. It almost feels like a miniseries where each segment introduces a whole new cast of characters and takes a new direction. But at the heart of it is always DiCaprio and Gladstone's characters' relationship, which is sweet, sad and horrible to watch all at the same time, and those elements weave together seamlessly for one of the most unique and engaging on-screen relationships I've ever seen.
If there's something I'd criticize about the film, it's that it can be repetitive. You hear and see a lot of the same information from the POVs of a lot of different characters. Though this is a deliberate choice (see the point about this being a frustrating film), it can still feel tedious to see people talk how someone was murdered for like the third time in excruciating detail. The slow pace can start to drag towards the end, even when it becomes clear which way the film is headed, and then I started to think "yeah, I get it, wrap it up will you". And while I'm complaining, some stupid b1tch wouldn't turn her phone off despite me loudly telling her twice, causing a mild inconvenience which took me out of the film.