[on
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)] But in the end, this film is about what all westerns are about, and perhaps all history: the brutal grab for land, resources and power. (...) This cattleman-plutocrat is William Hale, played by
Robert De Niro, a man of calcified resentment and self-importance who preens himself on his good relations with the Osage people. (...) Hale's rule, so avowedly caring and sensitive to the Osage, is in fact creating a vast dysfunction of depression, alcoholism, lawlessness, fatal illness and murder. (...) This is an utterly absorbing film, a story that
Martin Scorsese sees as a secret history of American power, a hidden violence epidemic polluting the water table of humanity. [The Guardian, May 2023]