KEITH UHLICH
Killers of the Flower Moon
film roundup
Killers of the Flower Moon (Dir. Martin Scorsese). Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone. Even by his usual lofty standards, Martin Scorsese’s captivating historical tragedy is a creative peak. Adapted from David Grann’s nonfiction book of the same name, Killers of the Flower Moon tells the horrific true story of the clandestine murders of multiple Osage natives in Oklahoma circa the 1920s. The instigators are rancher William Hale (Robert De Niro), a respected member of the community, and his semidimwitted nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), the latter of whom marries an Osage woman, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), with the express purpose of slow-killing her and stealing her oil-based fortune. The marital melodrama recalls Cukor’s Gaslight and Hitchcock’s Suspicion in its expertly cultivated air of uncertainty. Even when we know something is off in Ernest and Mollie’s relationship, we wish to think otherwise—much in the way a multiplicity of Americans prefers to think the best of a country that, beneath its welcoming veneer, has rapacious and malicious tendencies. The actors are all magKeith Uhlich is a NY-based writer published at Slant Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Time Out New York, and ICON. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. His personal website is (All (Parentheses)), accessible at keithuhlich.substack.com. 14
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nificent, with Gladstone proving to be the movie’s emotional center and, as the astonishingly provocative finale reveals, its tragic heart. [R] HHHHH Poor Things (Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos). Starring: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe. The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite) helmed this brash and bawdy riff on Frankenstein, adapted from Scottish writer Alisdair Gray’s novel. The “monster” is Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a reanimated woman with the body of a suicidal socialite and the brain of an infant. Over the course of the film’s two-and-a-half hours, she travels across Europe—much of it in the company of a buffoonish lothario played by Mark Ruffalo—and learns the various ways of mankind, most of them materialistic and predatory. But there is hope as well, particularly in the offbeat communities Bella discovers among the economically and socially downtrodden. It’s prime material for Lanthimos and his literally cockeyed perspective (the fisheye lenses he often loves to employ make a return here). And Stone is superb as Bella, who is up to submit herself to any indignity as long it proves a learning experience. The film does however wear out its welcome long before hour three, its point C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 8