Parents' Guide to Killers of the Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese's masterful movie is a fatalistic American epic of greed and violence, without any false idealism, as well as a brutal true-crime story. Whereas Scorsese's last outing, The Irishman, had a more reflective mood, Killers of the Flower Moon -- which has the breadth and depth of The Godfather -- finds him back in fighting shape, though the race-based murders will test a viewer's tolerance level for watching human atrocities take place on screen.

Scorsese casts his two favorite actors (who, combined, have appeared in 15 of the director's 26 feature films) together for the first time. De Niro and DiCaprio bring out the best (or worst?) in each other as they dive into their not-so-nice characters. Scorsese zips through the complex plot -- taken from the nonfiction book by David Grann -- like a bullet, building roadblocks and raising the stakes so neatly and cleverly that the movie's three-and-a-half-hour runtime never feels padded or inflated. Moreover, Killers of the Flower Moon works as a reevaluation of Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, which required a noble White hero to tell its positive tale of Native Americans. In contrast, Scorsese's movie shows White people as greedy, merciless, and racist, while the Osage are taken advantage of. True, it's another movie about Native peoples told from the perspective of White men. But this is a modern epic that uses more cultural sensitivity than we've seen in the past, inviting viewers to remember and reckon with the ugly legacy of what happened to the Osage peoples and how American greed continues to undermine Indigenous peoples today.