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Killers of the Flower Moon Movie Reviews: Critics Share Strong Reactions

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Killers of the Flower Moon Movie Reviews: Critics Share Strong Reactions

Reviews for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon are live, and they are glowing, to say the least. 

The legendary filmmaker is back with another historical epic, this time tackling a series of murders within the Osage tribe in 1920s Oklahoma after oil is found on indigenous land. 

The movie is based on the beloved 2017 book of the same name by David Grann and stars the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone. 

Coming from Apple Studios, Killers of the Flower Moon has the longest runtime of any theatrically released film in Scorsese’s illustrious career.

Killers of the Flower Moon Gets Glowing Reviews

Apple

Critics shared their strong reactions to the Martin Scorsese-directed Killers of the Flowers Moon in anticipation of the film’s theatrical debut. 

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Scorsese’s latest blockbuster has been Certified Fresh on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, sitting at 95% on the platform. The general consensus is that Killers of the Flower Moon is a sweeping epic with many praising its scale, sobering themes, and stellar performances. 

David Crow from Den of Geek remarked in his review Robert De Niro’s William Hale may be “the most vile creation ever realized by an actor who’s also played Al Capone and Jimmy Conway:”

“William Hale might even be the most vile creation ever realized by an actor who’s also played Al Capone and Jimmy Conway… While Hale might be the culmination of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’s’ conspiracy, he is just one thread in a larger national tapestry of pitiless conquest… Even though the film is told through the eyes of the killers, the movie has the grace to end on the Osage themselves… Scorsese sees both sides, but it’s obvious which he hopes will carry forward.”

YouTuber Zach Pope heaped praise upon the film, calling it an example of “why Scorsese is the best director to ever live:”

“Showcases why Scorsese is the best director to ever live. Delicately crafted to retell the tragic Osage Murders but give a glimpse into what Greed, Power, and corruption bring. A cinematic masterpiece that will be studied for years to come. Speechless”

ScreenAnarchy’s Shelagh Rown-Legg described Killers as “unflinching, honest, sweeping, intelligent, and necessary:”

“’Killers of the Flower Moon’ is the one of the best of Scorsese’s filmography – unflinching, honest, sweeping, intelligent, and necessary.”

Chris Bumbray of JoBlo’s Movie Network was just as positive, pointing to Leonardo DiCaprio’s starring performance as “One of [his] most complex:”

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“Absolutely ranks alongside Martin Scorsese’s masterpieces. One of DiCaprio’s most complex performances.”

DiCaprio and De Niro both “[flirt] with characters they have played before, now bring even greater depth” and “humor as sharp as their sadness,” according to The Movie Minute’s Joanna Lanfield:

“You will hardly be able to take your eyes away from Lily Gladstone, but you won’t want to miss a second of what Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro are doing. Both men, flirting with characters they have played before, now bring even greater depth and, often, humor as sharp as their sadness. How lucky are we to get to watch all of these creative people, coming together, at the top of their game.”

Julian Roman from Movie Web said the movie “immerses you in a seedy world of good old boy corruption, death, and deceit:”

“’Killers of the Flower Moon’ immerses you in a seedy world of good old boy corruption, death, and deceit. Scorsese’s trademark visual flair and sharp editing highlights a methodical storyline that fatigues from lack of mystery.”

Reeling Review’s Laura Clifford opined the film almost feels like “binging a prestige HBO limited series” than watching a movie:

“… In witnessing those murders – abrupt, violent and brutal – and in a paddling scene that oddly feels like a man being made in the mafia, that we most recognize Scorsese’s auteurship here, his lengthy period film often feeling more like binging a prestige HBO limited series.”

Dan Scully from Scullyvision called it “equal parts thrilling, educational, and dramatic:”

“It’s equal parts thrilling, educational, and dramatic, and there’s always room for bits of comedy to shine through… ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is equal parts family drama, organized crime movie, police procedural, courtroom drama, and historical epic. One could take the somewhat defensible position that this is Scorsese playing the hits, but it would be an unfair and reductive angle that dismisses how well all of it is synthesized.”

Native Viewpoint’s Vincent Schilling noted that “as a Native American” he ” absolutely loved this film,” praising its bringing of “the reality of this ugly history to light:”

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“As a Native American, and as a critic in general, I absolutely loved this film… Some moments were horrible and agonizing to watch, not because the film was horrible or agonizing, but because Scorsese brought the reality of this ugly history to light. I am so incredibly grateful for that.”

Robert Kojder (The Spool) conveyed his shock that “at 80 years old, Martin Scorsese continues to evolve his previous narratives and storytelling tactics:”

“At 80 years old, Martin Scorsese continues to evolve his previous narratives and storytelling tactics, implementing new imaginative tricks and putting out exquisite, scintillating work once again with some of his most trusted collaborators, in front of and behind the camera. I sincerely hope he has one more in, but if not, what a hell of a way to go out with this scalding, haunting, unflinching condemnation of America’s past that is still relevant today.”

Despite Killer of the Flower Moon‘s three-and-a-half-hour runtime Victoria Alexander from AlexanderFilmsInReview.com said, “The film’s length should be praised instead of criticized:”

“Scorsese intentionally strips the film of any traces of his style. It appears that DiCaprio structured his performance to show his character suffered being evil. The film’s length should be praised instead of criticized.”

San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle gave the movie the superlative of “a bladder-buster of a movie” with no “obvious bathroom break, [or] section where the story starts to sag:”

“Martin Scorsese’s ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is a bladder-buster of a movie with no obvious bathroom break, no section where the story starts to sag. This makes it, almost by definition, a good and admirable piece of work. But ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is also a lumbering mess, an ungainly and tonally odd film that, for all the strength of its parts, has little cumulative impact. Scorsese had ambitions to make a great American epic about the exploitation of Indigenous people, but he somehow ended up with a tawdry crime story, stretched to three and a half hours.”

Wenlai Ma from PerthNow praised Scorsese for his ability to “conjure a fully fleshed-out world of compelling people and a lived-in place,” but spotlighted some may “have the patience to be won over by [the film]:”

“That’s Scorsese’s mastery. He can conjure a fully fleshed-out world of compelling people and a lived-in place and demand you immerse yourself in it, even when it feels dirty (ahem, Wolf of Wall Street). Not everyone will have the patience to be won over by ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ but those people have the speedy distractions of TikTok.”

The Australian’s Stephen Romei called attention to DiCaprio and De Niro’s performances off of one another, wishing “the cinematic gods had intervened to make them work together more often:”

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“Every moment Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro share the screen will make you wish the cinematic gods had intervened to make them work together more often.”

One of the few negative reviews came from Beyond the Trailer’s Grace Randolph, who lambasted the film for providing “almost no context [for its story] making the film a frustrating watch that offers more questions than answers:”

“Less ‘Goodfellas,’ more ‘Gangs of New York’… Martin Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth assume the audience already knows so much about this true story, there is almost no context making the film a frustrating watch that offers more questions than answers.”

What to Expect from Killers of the Flower Moon?

Looking at the glowing reviews for Killer of the Flower Moon, audiences should expect another cinematic marvel from one of the most celebrated filmmakers of all time. 

Like Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer before it, one of the more impressive feats Martin Scorsese’s latest achieves is its use of its elevated runtime. 

Long movies are a massive deterrent for some, but if a film’s momentum can keep the audience engaged for well over three hours, then potential fatigue never has the time to set in. 

And Killers of the Flower Moon seems to have it that in spades. 

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After nearly 60 years working in Hollywood, Scorsese looks to still have some powder left in the chamber, as this marks his second-straight feature film to hit at least 95% on Rotten Tomatoes (after 2019’s The Irishmen). 

With 27 total feature-length projects under his belt, Killers of the Flower Moon seems like it has the critical juice to be an awards season juggernaut, potentially leading the iconic auteur to – what would be – only his second-ever Best Picture Academy Award win (after previously winning for 2006’s The Departed). 

Killers of the Flower Moon comes to theaters on Friday October 20. 

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Movie Reviews

‘Nickel Boys’ movie review: In another life, RaMell Ross’s devastating adaptation would have won Best Picture

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‘Nickel Boys’ movie review: In another life, RaMell Ross’s devastating adaptation would have won Best Picture

A still from ‘Nickel Boys’
| Photo Credit: Prime Video

RaMell Ross has been trying to reshape our understanding of what storytelling can be. His debut, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, turned everyday Black life into something lyrical and ineffable, demonstrating how cinema could hold time gently and reverently, before it slips away. Now, with Nickel Boys, his adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel, he has done something even more audacious. His reimagining of the novel wrestles with the weight of history in a reckoning that lingers in the body, mind, and in spaces that were never meant to be remembered.

Most filmmakers would approach a novel as precise and devastating as Whitehead’s with a kind of solemn fidelity, ensuring that every plot point is accounted for. Ross breaks the story open and lets its spirit breathe, unearthing something inside that feels even more elemental. He understands that trauma is how it is felt, rather than merely a retelling of how it happened, and the film unfolds not as a sequence of conclusive events but as elliptical and sensory, and as fractured as memory itself.

Nickel Boys (English)

Director: RaMell Ross

Cast: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor

Runtime: 140 minutes

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Storyline: Elwood Curtis’ college dreams are shattered when he’s sentenced to Nickel Academy, a brutal reformatory in the Jim Crow South

The film tells the story of Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), a bookish Black teenager in Jim Crow- era Florida. He is studious, hopeful, the kind of kid who absorbs Dr. King’s words like scripture and assumes that if he walks the righteous path, the world will walk with him. But America has never been kind to children like Elwood, and a cruel twist of fate sees him thrown into a brutal reform school for wayward boys — the titular Nickel Academy. There, he meets the streetwise and world-weary Turner (Brandon Wilson), and their friendship and tenuous hope forms the film’s emotional core.

A still from ‘Nickel Boys’

A still from ‘Nickel Boys’
| Photo Credit:
Prime Video

Ross’s decision to shoot Nickel Boys in first-person feels at once radical and deeply empathetic (although admittedly disorienting at first). Stories like these conventionally offer observation, but this one demands immersion. Ross reclaims the trick to mimic the sensation of a video game or a found-footage thriller as something deeper — a way of dissolving the barrier between audience and subject and stripping away the safety of detachment. There is no looking away because there is no “other” to look at; there is only us, trapped in the body of a boy whose fate pulses beneath our skin.

The infamous White House, where boys are taken to be abused, is filmed with an almost abstracted malice and its terror is only amplified by the unbearable sounds of a whirring industrial fan, meant to drown out the screams but failing to do so. Cinematographer Jomo Fray captures these moments with a disturbing detachment, letting shadows stretch and encroach, suffocating the frame as the school’s buried horrors make themselves felt.

His camera lingers on the textures of the world — dust catching in the air, the dull shine of sweat on a boy’s temple, the sweltering sun above a field where unspeakable things have happened. Ross even understands the story as a history of unnerving sensations —  the sickening lurch in your stomach when you realize the world doesn’t see you as a child but as a problem. The sound of footsteps in a hallway, the knowledge that someone will be taken, and it might be you.

But he’s uninterested in suffering for suffering’s sake. The film embeds us so deeply in Elwood’s interiority that his pain, and his small, stubborn joys, feel like our own. Both Elwood and Turner are still just boys, in all the ways boys are — restless, curious, alive. The world has tried to steal that from them, but Ross refuses to let it.

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A still from ‘Nickel Boys’

A still from ‘Nickel Boys’
| Photo Credit:
Prime Video

As it draws to a close, Ross makes Nickel feel so deeply, viscerally, in the marrow of our own memories that it forces us to sit in the terrible knowledge that the past is not past, that justice is often deferred into oblivion, and that the bodies buried in unmarked graves continue to shape very real landscapes. 

RaMell Ross has done something that far transcends just adapting a really good novel — it has altered the way we see. Nickel Boys is a redefinition of what cinema can do, how it can speak to us, how it can reshape the very act of remembering, and serves an argument for documented fiction as something more than just a well-meaning exercise in period-accurate suffering. In another life, it would have made for one of the most inspired Best Picture winners of this decade. But that’s unlikely.

Nickel Boys is currently available to stream on Prime Video

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Christopher Landon’s ‘HEART EYES’ (2025) – Movie Review – PopHorror

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Christopher Landon’s ‘HEART EYES’ (2025) – Movie Review – PopHorror

Slashers are among the favorite subgenres of most horror fans. When you add in the murder mystery elements of a whodunit, it becomes even more of an immersive and nostalgic watch. Such is the case with Heart Eyes, the newest Valentine’s Day related entry in the horror world. Let’s take a look at why this may make the perfect date night movie selection.

Heart Eyes is written slickly by Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day 2U 2019), Phillip Murphy (Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard 2021), and Michael Kennedy (Freaky 2020), and directed by Josh Ruben (Scare Me 2020). It stars Olivia Holt (Totally Killer 2023) and Mason Gooding (Scream 2022, read our blu-ray review here) as love-scorned co-workers who are forced together on a business assignment as the Heart Eyes Killer runs amok in their town against established couples.

Holt and Gooding have phenomenal timing and chemistry together, and their relationship really brews nicely as the body count starts to build. Heart Eyes really feels like the coming out party for Gooding, though the characters in general are given such fun dialogue that provides genuine laughs. Part love story and part meta commentary, this movie feels like Scream meets Cherry Falls.

Horror is experiencing a return to the 80s in the reemergence of the casual holiday-themed slashers, and Heart Eyes has the makings of a yearly watch-party flick. It’s not all witty banter though, as the jump scares and exquisite gore leave enough meat on the bone for darker genre fans. It’s simple and doesn’t try to be ‘elevated’. The diversity in this movie will help it to amass an audience of many different types of movie-goers.

The balance of Heart Eyes skews a bit more toward comedy than horror, even to a point of being over the top at times in some of its background characters. But the mystery and relationships do resolve in a very satisfying, fast paced way. It’s quite easy to see why a movie like this could end up in the hearts of viewers as one of the most fun murder mysteries of 2025.

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Movie Review: A Veteran adjusts to Civilian Life with “My Dead Friend Zoe”

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Movie Review: A Veteran adjusts to Civilian Life with “My Dead Friend Zoe”

Perhaps only an Iraq War combat vet would dare to tackle Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with the sort of sarcasm and gallows humor of “My Dead Friend Zoe.”

Director and co-writer and ex-paratrooper Kyle Hausmann-Stokes’ film’s title character is a cynical smart-ass, a female veteran and a ghost. Zoe is, as advertised, “Dead.”

Zoe, given just enough edge by Natalie Morales, has the license to call her service in Afghanistan “the dumbest war of all time,” the sass to suggest she and her fellow GI trooper/ mechanic Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green) “watch ‘M*A*S*H’ again,” but this time not “as a drinking game” and the impatience to refer to the group therapy they attend back home as “kumbaya” nonsense.

But Merit is the one physically there at therapy. Dead Zoe is the snide commentator in her head and the ongoing presence in her life, and the most important thing Merit won’t talk about in “group,” no matter how much the doctor and Vietnam vet in charge (Morgan Freeman) demands it.

“My Dead Friend” is a nice showcase for constantly-employed TV actress Morales (“Parks and Rec,” Grey’s Anatomy,” “The Morning Show”). But it’s a star vehicle for “Walking Dead” alumna and “Star Trek: Discovery” lead Martin-Green.

It is Merit who must hide the “dead” friend she still communes with, among other unspoken traumas of her service. She does this while in court-ordered group therapy, something that’s interrupted when she has to care for her testy, “wandering” and increasingly forgetful grandfather and role model, a retired Lt. Col. played by Ed Harris.

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That tells us this script is deep enough to attract talent, even as it gives Zoe and Merit Rihanna sing-alongs at work, even as Zoe serves up therapy-is-for-thee-but-not-for-me tough gal sarcasm softballs, even as she’s mocking Merit’s home state.

“Isn’t Oregon known for its serial killers?”

Freeman, who is as empathetic as he’s ever been on screen and the tightly-wound side of Harris lend the picture extra gravitas. But none of this would work if Martin-Green didn’t have the bearing of a soldier, one who has seen and experienced things. Compulsive jogging and visits to a cemetery are Merit’s coping mechanisms.

Introducing a possible love interest (“Pitch Perfect” alumnus Utkarsh Ambudkar) doesn’t add much that feels necessary, when layers of the Merit-Zoe connection and disconnection are left hanging. But even these mysteries benefit the film as we can infer “this” and understand without knowing “that.”

And Freeman’s doctor gives voice to talking therapy’s one essential truth in facing the many shades of PTSD, that one must “think very seriously about whether living in the past is worth it.”

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Stay through the credits if you want to see how important this subject is, with or without jokes only those who’ve been through it truly “get.”

Rating: R, combat stress subject matter, profanity

Cast: Sonequa Martin-Green, Natalie Morales, Ed Harris, Gloria Ruben, Utkarsh Ambudkar and Morgan Freeman

Credits: Directed by Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, scripted by Kyle Hausmann-Stokes and A.J. Bermudez. A Briarcliffe release.

Running time: 1:38

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About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine

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