Killers of the Flower Moon could be Scorsese’s best film yet

There are a few things in this world that you can truly count on: death, taxes and Taylor Swift’s love life attracting headlines. To their number can be added the certain knowledge that, when Martin Scorsese collaborates with either of his two muses, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, the results are somewhere between fascinating (Gangs of New York; New York, New York) and stone-cold cinema classics (Goodfellas; The Wolf of Wall Street).

Yet apart from a droll promotional film for a Macau casino (The Audition), the three men had never worked together. This has, finally, changed, as the trio unite for what looks like another Scorsese crime classic in the form of the three-and-a-half-hour epic Killers of the Flower Moon. 

Premiering at this week’s Cannes Film Festival but not released in the UK until October, the picture is based on a non-fiction book by David Grann. It concerns a notorious series of murders that took place among the Osage Nation in the 1920s in Oklahoma after oil was discovered on what was traditionally tribal land. Judging by the first trailer that has been released for the picture, Scorsese (who co-writes with Eric Roth and also directs) has elicited grim, menacing performances from both DiCaprio and a terrifying-looking De Niro, and has an impressive discovery in the form of his female lead, Lily Gladstone, who plays DiCaprio’s character’s wife, Mollie.

Martin Scorsese is, for my money, America’s greatest living director. Every single picture he has made in the past five decades is worth watching, and several are utter highlights of modern-day cinema. Yet he is now 80 years old, and there can only be so many masterpieces left. Let’s hope that Killers of the Flower Moon is as thrilling, complex and unforgettable as the rest of his work and exemplary of Scorsese’s legacy.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s World edition.