The 100 Best Movies of the 2020s (So Far) #29 âKillers of the Flower Moonâ (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2023)Martin Scorsese may like to think of âKillers of the Flower Moonâ as the Western that he always wanted to make, but this frequently spectacular American epic about the genocidal conspiracy that was visited upon the Osage Nation during the 1920s is more potent and self-possessed when it sticks a finger in one of the other genres that bubble up to the surface over the course of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime. The first and most obvious of those is a gangster drama in the grand tradition of the directorâs previous work; just when it seemed like âThe Irishmanâ mightâve been Scorseseâs final word on his signature genre, theyâve pulled him back in for another movie full of brutal killings, bitter voiceovers, and biting conclusions about the corruptive spirit of American capitalism. But if the âReign of Terrorâ sometimes proves to be an uncomfortably vast backdrop for Scorseseâs more intimate brand of crime saga, âKillers of the Flower Moonâ excels as a compellingly multi-faceted character study about the men behind the massacre. Over time, it becomes the most interesting of the many different movies that comprise it: A twisted love story about the marriage between an Osage woman (the indomitable Lily Gladstone) and the white man who â unbeknownst to her â helped murder her entire family so that he could inherit the headrights for their oil fortune (Leonardo DiCaprio, giving the best performance of his career as the dumbest and most vile character heâs ever played). Finding the right balance in this story is a challenge 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 âKillers of the Flower Moonâ 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. âDE https://www.indiewire.com/lists/best-movies-2020s/killers-of-the-flower-moon-dir-martin-scorsese-2023/