Scorsese's lavish epic is one hell of a story

The director brings an important tale to light, and makes a star of his leading lady to boot, says Hamish MacBain

Killers of the Flower Moon
206 mins, cert 15
*****

FOR decades now there has been a routine to the release of a new Martin Scorsese film. First it plays at a film festival where fanboy critics fall over each other to heap praise upon its cinephile-friendly visual references and its “layers” and explain that it’s not really a film about X, it’s a film about Y.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s 2006’s The Departed (which The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called “his best picture since GoodFellas”) or 2019’s The Irishman (which The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called “his best picture since GoodFellas”), by the time most people get to see any new Scorsese film they have been bludgeoned into submission by posters collapsing under the weight of five-star reviews, convinced themselves that an over-three-hours run time must automatically mean epic rather than bloated and got excited about the greatest living director’s latest and maybe — just maybe! — greatest.

Much has, as usual, been made of said latest-and-maybe-greatest’s length. But Killers of The Flower Moon is in fact three minutes shorter than Scorsese’s last, the aforementioned Irishman. Plus, he’s only made one film in the last 12 years that clocks in at under three hours (Silence, which was still two hours and 41 minutes and felt about twice that).