What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1994)

Where to begin regarding Killers of the Flower Moon? It’s another awesome collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. As well as another for Martin Scorsese and Leonardo Dicaprio. This is the first film to have all three together. Although De Niro and Dicaprio have joined forces before on This Boy’s Life, a pretty high quality, intense coming-of-age story from 1993. De Niro had a hand in casting Dicaprio for that movie, helping get the young star’s career off the ground. This was roughly around the time of his Oscar-nominated performance in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.

This is Scorsese’s 27th motion picture, not counting his documentaries. And at 80, he’s hotter than ever.

Killers of the Flower Moon is something of an epic. I’m not sure if I would call it a Western. To me it’s more of a crime thriller, with a familiar cast of dirty, immoral characters that typically populate a Scorsese picture. Instead of the inner cities of New York or Boston however, we’re in rural Oklahoma during the 1920s.

Leonardo Dicaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a war veteran returning home and looking for work from his Uncle, William Hale, played by Robert De Niro. Thanks mainly to oil, this is a very rich, prosperous time for the local Native American tribe the Osage. They wear expensive jewelry and drive fancy cars because all that in-demand ‘black gold’ is technically theirs to profit from.