This is lining up to be a thrilling year for film enthusiasts. If you head out to the theaters to support directors with strong voices and powerful visions, you can look forward to upcoming 2023 movies from Wes Anderson (Asteroid City), David Fincher (The Killer), Denis Villenueve (Dune: Part Two), Sir Ridley Scott (Napoleon), and Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon). That final one has raised all sorts of green flags, for it marks the first time the legendary director will team with both Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. And now, based on this first trailer, it looks exactly like the Oscar contender we believed it to be. Check the trailer out now.
Martin Scorsese has circled Killers of the Flower Moon for decades, ever since author David Grann announced it as a project. Hollywood adapted his previous novel The Lost City of Z into a compelling and underrated film that was a tough shoot for Robert Pattinson and Charlie Hunnam. And Scorsese ended up being a dream collaborator for Grann, who confessed to being “overwhelmed” by the master at work when he visited the Flower Moon set. And it’s easy to understand why. The subject matter falls directly into several wheelhouses that the director has explored – to great affect – over the course of his career.
The subtitle for Killers of the Flower Moon reads “The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” making it a historical drama linked into the world of organized crime… only, this time through the eyes of the lawmen sent to Oklahoma to investigate a series of grisly murders in the Osage Nation after oil is discovered on their land. Hence, the comparison that I made in the headline to both Scorsese’s masterpiece, Goodfellas, and the equally staggering Paul Thomas Anderson drama There Will Be Blood.
There was a traditional way to access this story of the Osage Nation murders, and that would be through the eyes of J. Edgar Hoover and the Texas Ranger (played by the excellent Jesse Plemons) who is sent in to investigate – hence the “Birth of the FBI” portion of David Grann’s nonfiction work. But the more that Scorsese worked on the script – and Leonardo DiCaprio gave his own input – they realized that they were more interested in the corruption that was infesting the Osage community once oil was discovered there, and people started losing their lives. The production itself ran into a few delays, one caused by an injury to Robert De Niro, but the film is ready to screen and is about to make its debut at the Cannes Film Festival.
The best news for Scorsese fans is that, in addition to heading to the AppleTV+ streaming service, Killers of the Flower Moon also will open in theaters, and screen the way that we assume the director intended. Look for it in October.