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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
**** Martin Scorsese’s final act is that of an American tragedian, funneling every last dime and minute possible into massive exaltations of betrayal and regret. And in Killers of the Flower Moon, the 80-year-old film icon unflinchingly dramatizes the history of white, 1920s Oklahomans wreaking intrafamily genocide upon the Osage people after oil is discovered beneath the tribe’s lands.
The murders are already underway when Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns from World War I to work for his uncle “King” Hale (Robert De Niro), a cattle baron whose actual business is infiltrating the Osage community and plotting to steal their fortunes. Thus, Ernest’s personal sins will become inextricable from his work—here’s looking at you, Henry Hill, Jordan Belfort, and so on—even if DiCaprio wears a perfectly dumb underbite to suggest that the character is straining not to comprehend his deeds.
There’s no such underplaying of intelligence from Lily Gladstone (Certain Women), whose acting superpower is gentle directness. She plays Mollie, an Osage woman who loses family members faster and faster when she marries Ernest. In the film’s only glaring flaw, Eric Roth and Scorsese’s script leaves Mollie, its most important Osage character, wanting for moments of dynamism amid her suffering.
That said, Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t about dynamism or change. Like The Irishman, it commits over three hours to study crushing inevitability, and Scorsese has essentially assembled the finest actors and craftspeople possible to manifest the fine print of a historical deal with the devil. Rodrigo Prieto’s camera swirls, and the late Robbie Robertson’s guitars haunt and entrance, but there’s no sizzle or emotional misdirection necessary. Flower Moon has its gaze fixed on the “how”—how human beings metabolize the white supremacy and greed necessary to share a home, or even children, with one’s victim.
Embodying that brazen matter-of-factness, De Niro gives perhaps his best performance since Heat as the conspiracy’s leader. He plays Hale as a Western crime boss, with a folksy forked tongue and the same murderous expression he wore in Goodfellas, here tucked behind benevolent speeches and tiny spectacles.
Flower Moon is at once a crime epic, a spiritual exorcism, a portrait of a ne’er-do-well, a black comedy about the FBI’s birth, and a ballad of those who didn’t see modernity coming. Yet it is also about making movies, as Scorsese reminds us with a brilliant closing comment on the nature of true crime and mass media. If this is one of the last Martin Scorsese movies, behold the bracing reflection and psychic wreckage of a murderer, a country, and a legendary artist all asking: “What have I done?” R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Academy, Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 21, Cinemagic, City Center, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Hollywood, Lake Theater, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Twin, Studio One.
SHE CAME TO ME
**** There’s no way to describe the plot of She Came to Me—moody opera composer (Peter Dinklage) falls for lusty tugboat captain (Marissa Tomei)—without it sounding like a joke. Yet somehow, writer-director Rebecca Miller finds earnest emotion amid joyous absurdity, fashioning a tender romantic drama with a few acidic flourishes. Looking dapper beneath a mountainous goatee, Dinklage stars as Steven, whose in-the-works opus is marred by a “temporary blockage.” The cure? Capt. Karina Trento, whose fearsome sexual powers inspire him to write an opera about a murderous, ax-wielding siren of the high seas. Weaving a web of mythic coincidences, Miller intertwines Katrina and Steven’s affair—he’s married to Patricia (Anne Hathaway), a therapist—with a subplot about two young lovers (Evan Ellison and Harlow Jane) forced apart by a statutory rape allegation from a racist stenographer (Brian d’Arcy James). Parts of She Came to Me are as uproarious as Miller’s Maggie’s Plan (2015), not least of all Patricia’s funny, moving quest to become a nun. Plan, however, was merry and mocking, whereas She Came to Me is a purehearted paean to true love, be it vibrant and youthful or weathered and real. A climactic elopement aboard Katrina’s tugboat is like something out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and like the Bard, Miller (yes, she’s Arthur’s daughter) reveals humanity through flights of fancy. Are we all just composers and captains looking for love? If so, the joke’s beautifully on us. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Fox Tower.
TAYLOR SWIFT: THE ERAS TOUR
**** An elusive goddess leaping into a sea of light. A swaggering showwoman in a sparkly jacket. A soulful yearner seated at a flower-painted piano. In just under three fleeting hours, the filmed version of Taylor Swift’s career-defining tour captures her countless artistic identities and the boundless sincerity that unites them. Culled from three August shows at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., The Eras Tour is at once intimate and galactic. Holding illuminated phones aloft, the audience becomes a starry screen onto which Swift seemingly projects her every feeling—defiance, joy, regret, belief. It’s exhilarating to watch her revel in her power (especially when she kisses one of her own biceps before belting out “The Man”), but she doesn’t beat us into submission with her fame. While the performance requires a truckload of props (bicycles! Umbrellas!), it always comes back to Swift on a dark and gleaming stage, baring her heart in tender songs like “My Tears Ricochet” and “All Too Well.” For what it’s worth, coming from a non-Swiftie, I think what makes her cool is her steadfast uncoolness. She is to music what James Cameron is to movies—an irony-immune entertainer whose unbowed earnestness stifles the cynical noise of pop culture. Sam Wrench (Billie Eilish: Live at the O2) directed The Eras Tour, but Swift plans to direct a film of her own for Searchlight Pictures, which feels inevitable and necessary. Cinema—like the world itself—needs her. NR. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Bagdad, Cedar Hills, City Center, Eastport, Empirical, Fox Tower, Joy Cinema, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Wunderland Beaverton, Wunderland Milwaukie.
DARK HARVEST
*** David Slade, who made his name directing harrowing films like Hard Candy (2006) and 30 Days of Night (2007), returns to familiarly brutal territory with Dark Harvest. Based on Norman Partridge’s 2006 novel, the film follows teenage boys in an isolated community in the 1960s who must kill a creature named Sawtooth Jack every October to prevent the local crops from being destroyed (the “winning” boy will be given a new car and the opportunity to leave town). Dark Harvest is saddled with an overly cagey script and a nonsensical fantasy plot, but Slade builds a visually rich world full of autumn flavor and golden-hour silhouettes. And while most of the characters are greaser and jock types who seem plucked from The Outsiders (1983) and dropped into Pumpkinhead (1988), the cast mostly does a fine job of filling out the roles (though Luke Kirby overacts as an antagonistic cop connected to Sawtooth Jack). Plus, the monster itself is intimidating and the lore behind it is intriguing, even if the rules for hunting it are murky. Dark Harvest might trip on itself at times, but it’s still a satisfyingly spooky seasonal offering from Slade. R. DANIEL RESTER. On demand.
SCRAPPER
*** Georgie (Lola Campbell) gets along OK by herself. Secretly living alone after her mother’s death, the 12-year-old cleans her suburban London flat, hauls out the trash, and nicks bicycles to make the rent. It’s a sad state made nearly adorable by zippy filmmaking and Georgie’s precocious yet hard-bitten energy. In Scrapper, Campbell channels the soul of a grifter in ways not seen since teenage Kaitlyn Dever on Justified, but before neighbors and teachers detect that Georgie lives unsupervised, her long-lost father Jason (Harris Dickinson of Triangle of Sadness fame) surfaces after years of partying in Ibiza. In her dad, Georgie finds her reflection—sometimes identical, sometimes inverse. He may look like a soccer hooligan, but he shares Georgie’s industriousness and has a child’s kooky sense of humor, bringing out the dubious adult in his daughter. Scrapper director Charlotte Regan, who hails from this working-class London milieu, effortlessly captures how the community wildly crisscrosses in the shared spaces around their pastel, candy-colored flats. While sudden detours into mockumentary, magical realism, and surveillance aesthetics make it seem like she’s emptying a bag of styles in her feature debut, Regan still manages to succeed by empowering her actors—whether they’re the star of last year’s Palme d’Or winner or 12 years old. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Living Room.
WHEN EVIL LURKS
*** Ed and Lorraine Warren (of Conjuring fame) once hypothesized that demons operate in three progressive stages: infestation, oppression and possession. Alternatively, When Evil Lurks is more of a “wham, bam, demon already swelling inside 400-pound man” kind of picture. That’s the immediate inciting grotesquery of director Demián Rugna’s depiction of a demonic force—or “a rotten” as the amazing Spanish translation goes—infecting humans and beasts in the Argentine backcountry. Adult brothers Jimmy (Demián Salomón) and Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) initially hope they can mercy-kill their bedridden neighbor who’s hosting the evil, but it won’t be that easy. As the contagion’s power emerges, Rugna’s first two acts soar with constant “out of the frying pan, into the fire” logic and pacing. It’s all tumors and mouth sounds and child endangerment expressing the dire emotional state of Pedro in particular, grounding the film’s no-prisoners shock value. Granted, When Evil Lurks can’t quite sustain its impressive escalation (Jimmy and Pedro’s third-act meeting with a “rotten” expert slows the climax to something more procedural). But if your Halloween watchlist needs a sick new heart and brain breaker, try a movie that’s liberal with its entrails and where a demon hunter professes with a straight face: “Evil likes children, and children like evil.” NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Bridgeport.
DICKS: THE MUSICAL
** There is a moment in Dicks: The Musical when a no-bullshit corporate titan (Megan Thee Stallion) launches into a BDSM song-and-dance routine, which earns the approval of none other than God (Bowen Yang). “Bitch, that was fun,” the Almighty declares. Far be it from me to disagree with a deity, but he and I clearly have different definitions of “fun,” given that the musical number is like every scene in Dicks—tuneless, witless and so mechanically directed that you will pray to be teleported to an alternate timeline where John Waters directed this mess instead of the depressingly serviceable Larry Charles (Borat). Based on the off-Broadway musical Fucking Identical Twins, Dicks stars Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp (who wrote the play and the film) as manic Wall Street bros who discover they’re twins and scheme to reunite their divorced parents, Harris and Evelyn (Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally). If Charles knew how to film a musical, he might have been able to redeem the movie’s barely melodic songs, but you never feel movement of the music or the characters. And while there’s no denying the film’s wholesome intentions—a little incest aside, it’s mostly a bighearted fable about self-acceptance—Jackson and Sharp’s frantic, almost literally eye-popping performances suggest that their theater and television work failed to prepare them for the subtler demands of the big screen. Lane, however, manages to modulate his explosive energy, despite being saddled with the film’s cringiest scene: Harris chewing meat and spitting it into the mouths of inbred creatures called Sewer Boys. Needless to say, food, like humor, is a matter of taste. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Bridgeport, Cinema 21, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Studio One.