![]() ![]() This cattleman-plutocrat is William Hale, played by Robert De Niro, a man of calcified resentment and self-importance who preens himself on his good relations with the Osage people. Spiritual nausea … Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon. Later the bodies of Osage murder-victims are found, including Mollie’s wayward sister Anna (Cara Jade Myers), whose autopsy is bizarrely carried out in the open air, at the crime scene itself. And there is something else: Mollie and her family are deeply disturbed by mysterious illnesses which have been killing off Osage people, one by one. But they are still subject to a racist and infantilising condition of “guardianship”: to claim the income and spend it, Osage individuals need a white co-signatory. Lily Gladstone gives a performance of tragic force as Mollie Burkhart, a Native American woman from the Osage tribe who, like all her people, has become unexpectedly wealthy because the apparently stony and unpromising land in Oklahoma on which the authorities allowed the Osage to settle turned out to have huge reserves of oil. But in the end, this film is about what all westerns are about, and perhaps all history: the brutal grab for land, resources and power. It echoes Scorsese’s earlier work about mob violence, mob loyalty and the final, inevitable sellout to the federal authorities, whose own bad faith gradually emerges. It places in the drama’s foreground a gaslit marriage of lies and poisoned love. ![]() With co-writer Eric Roth, Scorsese crafts an epic of creeping, existential horror about the birth of the American century, a macabre tale of quasi-genocidal serial killings which mimic the larger erasure of Native Americans from the US. ![]() Tatum O'Neal won the Oscar for this at-times both heartless AND heartfelt romp, but Paper Moon truly is Bogdanovich's show, staking a phenomenal follow-up to The Last Picture Show.M artin Scorsese’s western true-crime thriller is about the US’s Osage murders of the early 1920s, based on the nonfiction bestseller by David Grann. ![]() In this PG-rated Great Depression-set dramedy, a con man (Ryan O'Neal) finds himself saddled with a young girl (Tatum O'Neal) who may or may not be his daughter and the two forge an unlikely partnership. But then, it dares to channel 1970s sensibilities like foul language and talk of women's problems. From Lazslo Kovacs' ace black and white cinematography to set designer Polly Platt's period detail to the choice of soundtrack (everything from The Jack Benny Program to the vintage tune "Paper Moon" fills your ears), the film feels as rooted in the Dust Bowl era as John Steinbeck. In real life, former film critic Bogdanovich befriended and interviewed every lionized director from George Cukor (The Philadelphia Story) to Howard Hawks (Bringing Up Baby) to Leo McCarey (Duck Soup). The director's deep-seated appreciation for classic American cinema shines throughout, perhaps even more so than with his '30s screwball love letter What's Up Doc. Getting the much-deserved Blu Ray treatment, Peter Bogdanovich's 1930s throwback and kiss to the Golden Age of H'Wood deserves even more acclaim in the wake of The Artist's "Best Picture" win in 2012. ![]()
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