Rockeway Reviews
By Lucas Battista
“Killers of the Flower Moon”
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone and Robert De Niro. Now streaming on Apple TV.
A tactful but ambitious depiction of another skeleton buried deep inside America’s closet.
Martin Scorsese has demonstrated in the last few decades that he possesses a wide and colorful palate, with “Silence,” “Shutter Island,” “The Aviator,” “Kundun,” and many other unexpected films already adjacent to an absurdly long résumé, as is par for the course. “Killers of the Flower Moon” might seem like “Goodfellas” with a change of scenery, grappling with a seemingly similar subject matter, but, at heart, it is another experimental detour, and all for the better.
In its three and a half hour run time, we are given a stirring look into a conspiracy of avarice and terror perpetrated against the Osage people, architected by a conniving rancher through the lens of his naive and gullible protégé, who marries an Osage woman in pursuit of her headstone and the oil money behind it. Not a second is lost that isn’t gripping, and it tackles carefully, not just more obvious themes, but a myriad of topics around it including the inability of such a painful topic to truly be explored thoroughly by a narrative-driven story. It’s absolutely worth a watch.
“Leave the World Behind”
Starring: Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke and Myha’la. Now Streaming on Netflix.
What happens when the final misfortune of all-out apocalypse is not even the collapse of infrastructure or governments, but ourselves?
“Leave the World Behind” is by no means “Threads.” This is not a deft, stark portrayal of a hypothetical nuclear-holocaust, or apocalypse in general. It’s concerned less with when the bombs drop, and more with how we’ll react to them, and it does indeed play well to its tune.
Anything, and quite literally everything, one might expect from the breakdown of information and media to Havana syndrome to cyberattacks and all our other twenty first century fears are depicted. At every moment that a new knot in the mystery is unraveled, the characters, and viewers, are both left in total and blank confusion to react duly. The film itself carries great strengths in its camerawork and bouncing from bizarre scene to scene but does indeed suffer from a very quiet “climax,” or lack thereof. Take it for what it is, and nothing more.
