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      BAFTA Awards 2024 Winners: ‘Oppenheimer’ Sweeps

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      “The Holdovers” and “Poor Things” were also honored at the British equivalent of the Oscars, while “Saltburn” and “Barbie” left empty-handed.“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie about the development of the atomic bomb, swept the board at the EE British Academy Film Awards in London on Sunday.The movie won seven awards at Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars, including best film, best director for Nolan and best leading actor for Cillian Murphy for his portrayal of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.It beat four other nominees to the best film prize, including “Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos’s take on a Frankenstein story and “The Holdovers,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about a boarding school teacher stuck looking after a student over the holidays. It also beat “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour epic about the Osage murders of the 1920s, and “Anatomy of a Fall,” Justine Triet’s multilingual courtroom drama about a woman accused of murdering her husband.In the days leading up to the awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs, most British movie critics predicted that “Oppenheimer” would win big. Tom Shone, writing in The Times of London, said that Nolan’s “magnum opus” was an instant classic. “Sometimes the front-runner is the front-runner for a reason,” he added.Still, the prizes were Nolan’s first director wins at the BAFTAs, despite several previous nominations for his movies “Inception” and “Dunkirk.”At the ceremony at London’s Royal Festival Hall, Nolan, who grew up in London, seemed a little overwhelmed by all the accolades. Accepting the best director prize, he called the award “an incredible honor” then reminisced about his parents dragging him to the festival hall, a major classical music venue as a boy. In fact, he said, his younger brother, now also a TV and filmmaker, had beaten him to the hall’s stage “by about 40 years” because he once took part in a performance of “The Nutcracker.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Martin Scorsese Narrates a Scene From ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

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      The director narrates a “circular ballet” sequence where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Ernest Burkhart, is taken in for questioning.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.To tell the sweeping story of the Osage murders of the 1920s in “Killers of the Flower Moon” (nominated for 10 Oscars, including best picture), the director Martin Scorsese opted mostly not to sweep the camera along with the narrative.“Dealing with the landscape and the period, I tended to have more stable images,” he said during a video interview, “images that were almost like old photographs in a way.”But one key moment called for a change. As investigators go to Oklahoma to look into the Osage murders and disappearances, they drill down to a group of individuals they think are involved. And in this scene, the lawmen converge to arrest one person they believe they can get information from, Ernest Burkhart, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.As Ernest sits in a pool hall/barbershop, investigators descend on the space to surround him.“Since the characters are all circling around each other in the movie, and since the circle gets tighter and tighter, my drawing for the shot was simply a circle with an arrow. That was it,” Scorsese said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lily Gladstone on Her History-Making Oscar Nomination

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      Lily Gladstone shed a few tears when she heard Jack Quaid read her name in the best actress Oscars category on Tuesday morning. “I didn’t expect that I would cry the way that I did,” she said. But it was nothing compared with the reaction of her parents.“It definitely turned on the waterworks,” said Gladstone, who stars as Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman whose white husband is part of a murderous conspiracy in the Martin Scorsese epic “Killers of the Flower Moon.” She was calling from Pawhuska, Okla., shortly after watching the Oscar nominations announcement on FaceTime with her parents.After all, it’s not every day that you’re nominated for your first Oscar — or that you become the first Native American person to be nominated for a competitive acting Academy Award.“It’s something that I wasn’t sure I would see in my career, in my lifetime,” said Gladstone, 37, who has Blackfeet and Nez Percé heritage. “I hope that it just means that people start caring more and learning more about these histories.”Gladstone isn’t the first Indigenous artist up for best actress — Keisha Castle-Hughes (“Whale Rider,” 2003) and Yalitza Aparicio (“Roma,” 2018) were also nominated in the same category — but she is the first from the United States. The folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie is considered the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar (for best song, “Up Where We Belong” from “An Officer and a Gentleman” in 1983), but her heritage has recently been disputed. And in 2019, Wes Studi, who is Cherokee American, was given an honorary Oscar for “his indelible film portrayals and for his steadfast support of the Native American community.”Gladstone has had a busy month: On Jan. 7, she became the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress, delivering a powerful speech in which she spoke a few lines in the Blackfeet language. She also picked up a best actress win from the New York Film Critics Circle, as well as nominations from the Critics Choice Awards and the Screen Actors Guild.“I’m hopeful because of the way things are trending now: We’re telling our own stories, or we have a really heavy hand in shaping how stories about us are told,” she said.“Killers,” based on the nonfiction book by David Grann, was reconceived early on to focus on the relationship between Mollie and her husband, Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio), who conspires with his uncle (Robert De Niro) to kill her relatives in a bid to seize her family’s oil-rich Oklahoma land.Gladstone in the film opposite Leonardo DiCaprio. Apple TV+Since the film was released in October, critics have singled out Gladstone. Anthony Lane, writing in The New Yorker, heralded her as “unmistakably the movie’s most compelling presence.” Gladstone grew up acting in plays staged by a traveling children’s theater on the Blackfeet reservation in northwestern Montana. She landed a breakthrough role in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 indie, “Certain Women,” that raised her profile considerably, but “Killers,” with its reported $200 million budget and A-list cast, vaulted her into hyperspace.In a 15-minute interview, Gladstone shared what she hoped her nomination portends for the industry, how she first became interested in studying the Blackfeet language, and what people who discovered her in “Killers of the Flower Moon” should watch her in next. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Congratulations!Thank you. It was great every time the film got a nod, but the one that really got me was Robbie Robertson [for best original score for “Killers of the Flower Moon”]. Getting to watch that nomination come in with my dad was really special, because my dad introduced me to Robbie Robertson as a musician, which was the whole reason I even knew who Martin Scorsese was as a filmmaker. My dad told me about their friendship and, as a 10-year-old, I remember him saying, “You know, one day he’s going to make his Indian movie because of his friendship with Robbie.” So it was cool to remind him of that. Seeing how touched my folks were — that was everything.What has it been like to receive such copious recognition from the industry after years of struggling to find parts that weren’t insulting or exploitative?It’s time that Native characters based upon living incredible women like Mollie Kyle be given the heart of these films. “Killers of the Flower Moon” was an opportunity to restore a place onscreen for Native women that history has excluded us from. So to have Mollie and her sisters and her mother and her community be characters that, just by being who they are onscreen, are changing people’s stereotypes and contextualizing moments in history that maybe make the present make a little bit more sense — it’s long overdue.You had the chance to speak with Mollie Burkhart’s granddaughter, Margie. What was something she shared about Mollie that surprised you or that you incorporated into the character?What a caring mother she was. Margie shared that when her dad, Cowboy, would have chronic ear infections and earaches, Mollie would blow tobacco smoke in his ears, which is something a lot of elders do back home where I’m raised, too. And Margie herself is so smart and grounded, and loving. At our first meeting, her body language, her intonation and the way I could see thoughts turning over in her head went into how I shaped Mollie. Her observational wry humor, the intelligence, the ability to read what’s going on in the room, the warmth all stood out. I know that those things are inherited from family, so I feel like the biggest clues to who Mollie would have been is the way that she’s echoed in her grandchildren.You spoke a few lines in the language of your people, the Blackfeet tribe, after your historic win at the Golden Globes. When and how did you become interested in studying Blackfeet?Growing up on my reservation, I picked it up. I’m not fluent. One of the first sentences we learn how to construct is how to introduce yourself to a group of people. You say your Blackfeet name, and then you also tell everybody where you’re from, which people you come from, which is what I did at the Globes. I wouldn’t have been up on that stage if it weren’t for how early in my life my community identified my gift and my love for acting. Performing and telling stories has always been synonymous with my very name; I’ve always been encouraged to do this, in whatever form it takes. There were a lot of years where acting was a means of teaching and teaching about our history, specifically, the Native American boarding school experience.After my speech at the Globes, it was moving to see the response from Blackfeet people on TikTok and Facebook. One family had recorded their little girl, who is learning Blackfeet along with English, and when she heard me speaking, she started talking back in Blackfeet to the screen, and then when I was done speaking, she went, “Soōkaapii,” which means “It’s good.” Like, “That was good.” That just broke my heart wide open.Do you have any favorites among the nominated films?I’m ecstatic to see the love for “American Fiction.” And to see Danielle Brooks hold it down for the entirety of “The Color Purple” — she’s unbelievable. And Sandra [Hüller’s] work, oh my God. And then people I’ve been watching for years — being in conversations, in rooms alongside Annette Bening has been mind-blowing and so touching. I’m stoked for everybody.Though “Killers’ was your breakout role, you have a film, TV and theater résumé that spans more than a decade. Any recommendations for what people should watch you in next?Definitely stream “Reservation Dogs” — and not just my episodes! It’s an incredible, incredible series; each episode is so full, so funny, so heartbreaking. There’s a reason that it’s been named the best show by so many publications. “The Unknown Country” is another one that shows the way the performances of the incredible Indigenous actors in “Killers of the Flower Moon” have helped shift paradigm and break stereotypes for people.And then, I can’t share it yet, but sometime in the not-too-distant future, people will be able to see “Fancy Dance,” which is the absolute best film to watch in tandem with “Killers of the Flower Moon.” It’s the same land, the same issues, exactly 100 years later, and how they’ve manifested into the modern age. It’s an incredible love story between an aunt and her niece and a display of matrilineal resilience and love and survival. I’m so excited that people will be able to access it soon.Fans have said they want to see you in a Marvel role. What is your dream role?I have to acknowledge my little, cute, roly-poly, chunky 5-year-old self who wanted nothing more in the world than to be an Ewok. We’re in the age of C.G.I., so I think if Ewoks are brought back, it has to be handcrafted the way it was in the late ’70s, early ’80s. So, if not an Ewok, something to do with their preservation as an incredible little group of — I guess you can call them people. More

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      What Will Be Nominated for Oscars Next Week, and What Won’t?

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      While “Oppenheimer,” “Barbie” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” are likely to do well, the directors race is hardly set and other categories are open, too.When it comes to predicting the Oscars, you ultimately have to go with your gut … and mine is in a state of agita.That’s what happens when there are simply too many good movies and great performances to all make the cut: Even the hypothetical snubs I’m about to dole out have me tied up in knots.Which names can you expect to hear on Tuesday, when the Oscar nominations are announced? Here is what I project will be nominated in the top six Oscar categories, based on industry chatter, key laurels from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards, and the nominations bestowed by the Screen Actors Guild, Producers Guild of America and Directors Guild of America. Well, all of those things, and my poor, tormented gut.Best PictureLet’s start with the safest bets. “Oppenheimer,” “Barbie” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” scored top nominations from the producers, directors and actors guilds last week and I expect each film to earn double-digit Oscar nominations. “The Holdovers” and “Poor Things” are secure, too: Though they didn’t make it into SAG’s best-ensemble race, both films boast lead actors who’ve won the Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award. If this were an old-school race, these would be the five nominees.But there are five more slots to fill, and I project the next three will go to “Past Lives” and “American Fiction,” passion picks with distinct points of view, as well as “Maestro,” the sort of ambitious biopic that Oscar voters are typically in the tank for. I’m also betting that the French courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Fall” and the German-language Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” find favor with the academy’s increasingly international voting body. (Even the Producers Guild, which so often favors big studio movies over global cinema, found room to nominate that pair.)There are still a few dark horses that hope to push their way into this lineup, like “The Color Purple,” “May December,” “Society of the Snow” and “Origin.” But I suspect these 10 are locked and loaded.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Paul Giamatti, Bradley Cooper, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and More Celebrities at the National Board of Review gala

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      The stars were among the 17 honorees at the annual National Board of Review gala, as awards season ramps up.On a not-at-all red carpet inside Cipriani 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan on Thursday night, Da’Vine Joy Randolph was glowing.“The fact that these people actually even seen my work is just mind-blowing,” said the actress, a star of “The Holdovers,” who was being honored with the National Board of Review’s best supporting actress prize at its annual film awards gala, just days after she had won her first Golden Globe on Sunday for her role in the film.A few feet away on the gray carpet was Celine Song, who came to accept the prize for best directorial debut for “Past Lives.” She was sporting a tuxedo jacket, a long skirt and a bow tie.“Because the movie is so personal, any time somebody connects to the film, I always feel less lonely; I feel very seen and understood and embraced,” said Ms. Song, who based the romantic film partly on her own experience with a childhood friend.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      The Grim Heartbeat Propelling ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

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      Early in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” an Osage woman named Mollie gives her gravely unsuitable white suitor, Ernest, a Stetson. It’s a large off-white hat with a bound-edge brim and a wide ribbon around the band. It’s a gift but it feels more like a benediction, and anyone who’s ever watched an old western film (or “Star Wars”) will recognize the symbolism of her largess. Mollie is telling Ernest that she sees him as a good guy, even if the movie has already violently upended the familiar dualism of the white hat vs. black.That dichotomy shapes “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a deeply American story of greed, betrayal and murder told through the anguished relationship between Mollie (Lily Gladstone) and Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio). It’s around 1919 and Ernest is wearing his World War I uniform when he dismounts a train in Fairfax, an Oklahoma boomtown where luxury cars rumble down dirt roads. He’s come to live with his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), a smooth-talking rancher who, in one breath, asks him if he has seen bloodshed and, in the next, describes the Osage as the finest and “and most beautiful people on God’s earth.”The movie is based on David Grann’s appalling, all-too-true crime book from 2017, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I.” In adapting it to the screen, Scorsese and Eric Roth have dramatically narrowed the role of the F.B.I. to focus on the multiple murders — scores, perhaps hundreds — of Osage members that took place largely in the 1920s on the tribe’s oil-rich reservation in northern Oklahoma. As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, oil made the tribe among the wealthiest people in the world. It also made them the target of numerous white predators. As a 1920 article in Harper’s ominously put it: “The Osage Indians are becoming so rich that something will have to be done about it.”The following year, Congress passed a law that required the Osage to prove they could handle their reserves “responsibly.” If they couldn’t, they were declared incompetent and appointed a guardian; it was a status, as Grann explains, that was usually given to full-blooded Osage like Mollie. It’s instructive then that the first time you see Mollie in “Killers,” she is in an office being asked to state her name by an unseen man. “I’m Mollie Kyle, incompetent,” she says, her face a serene blank. The man is her guardian, yet another smooth talker, though one with a picture of a Ku Klux Klan rider on his wall. When Mollie leaves his office, Scorsese cuts to a shot of her feet on a doormat imprinted with “KIGY,” an abbreviation for “Klansman, I greet you.”Mollie gives Ernest the Stetson soon afterward in a sequence that both lays out many of the story’s themes and beautifully illustrates dialectical filmmaking in four or so revelatory minutes. It opens at the 22-minute mark with Mollie walking away from the camera while coyly looking over her shoulder at Ernest, who’s watching her from a car. By that point, he has started working as a chauffeur ferrying around locals. She’s one of his regulars, and he thinks she’s sweet on him, which pleases Hale. If “we mix these families together,” he tells Ernest, Mollie’s money “will come to us.” As he often does, Ernest looks utterly baffled by his uncle.As Mollie walks toward her house, a pulsing bass line revs up. The soundtrack includes original music by Scorsese’s friend and frequent collaborator Robbie Robertson (who died in August), as well as old songs like the jumpy blues number that’s playing when Ernest and Mollie first meet in town. The notes that begin pulsing now create an entirely different mood and feeling simply because they sound like a heartbeat, if one that sometimes skips. And for good reason: The song is “Heartbeat Theme/Ni-U-Kon-Ska,” the meaning of which becomes clear when, after a few more cuts, the camera settles on Ernest’s face. “I am an Osage brave,” he says in halting voice-over, his words creating an odd counter-rhythm to the thumping.Apple TV+Ernest’s voice-over continues as the movie cuts to a brief bird’s-eye view of him pulling away from Mollie’s house followed by a close-up of his hand holding an opened illustrated book. Scorsese — working with his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker — holds on the shot long enough for you to scan both pages, the chapter heading (“Osage Culture & History”) and the simple illustrations, including of a woman near a tepee, some men dancing around a fire and others on horseback. As Ernest speaks, he turns the page, revealing other images — a buffalo hunt, a map of Indian Territory — and it becomes clear that he’s reading, either aloud or in his head, from this book. Ni-U-Kon-Ska, he says, means “children of the middle waters.”Titled “Lilly’s Wild Tales Among the Indians,” the book belongs to Hale, who had earlier instructed Ernest to school himself on the Osage. It resembles the kind of old-fashioned children’s primers from the 19th and early 20th centuries that were still floating around the New York City school system midcentury, so it’s easy to imagine that a book like this drifted into Scorsese’s life at one point. (The main illustration in the movie is based on one such volume from 1901.) The book is as crudely simplistic as you would expect, yet when Ernest reads the words, “‘Move,’ said the Great White Father, from Missouri, from Arkansas, from Kansas,” he is also speaking to the grimly true history that informs Scorsese’s movie.Ernest reads a caption on an illustration, his finger tracing the words, “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” Just as he finishes the sentence, you hear the metallic jangling of a door opening, and the camera hurriedly pans up to find Ernest’s brother, Byron (Scott Shepherd) — in another light-colored hat — bursting into the room. “All right,” Byron says. “Let’s go.” The men rush to join a third, Blackie Thompson (Tommy Schultz), who’s waiting in an idling car. Ernest’s voice-over continues as they drive off, and a wailing harmonica joins the heartbeat, Ernest’s voice briefly dropping out when the men — now all wearing hoods over their heads — excitedly rob a wealthy Osage couple at gunpoint.The men convene at a billiard parlor (Scorsese is working fast!) where Ernest, as will be his habit for the remainder of the movie, makes a catastrophically wrong bet. “I love money! I love money!” he exclaims just before losing his night’s take. It’s first light when the men leave the parlor, and as they walk out Ernest’s voice-over resumes: “Dawn was always a sacred time for prayers.” The movie then cuts to a long shot of Mollie praying at a riverbank, an image that’s followed by a rapid volley of shots — of the sun, moon and fire — that ends on a vast green field dotted with the purple and white flowers that give the movie its title. It’s as if, Ernest says, Wah’kon-tah, the Osage word for God, had sprinkled the Earth with sugar candy.Although Ernest’s voice-over pauses during the robbery, it only fully ends when he and Mollie are at an outdoor christening, a nod at the life and the children they will soon make together. The strange heartbeat, though, continues as Ernest drives Mollie to her house, bringing the sequence full circle. This time, though, he walks Mollie to her front door, where she stops to give him the Stetson before they enter the house, where her mother is. Before they do, he puts on the hat. It’s preposterously large. It’s also a near-match for the pale 10-gallon hat that the John B. Stetson Company custom made for the silent-film star Tom Mix, a Hollywood hero who helped popularize the country’s romantic myth of itself that Scorsese furiously dismantles in this brilliant movie shot by shot, scene by scene, heartbeat by heartbeat. More

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      In Indigenous Communities, a Divided Reaction to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

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      The filmmakers’ attention to detail draws praise, but the question of perspective and who gets to tell the story is also at issue.After watching “Killers of the Flower Moon” at a July screening in Tulsa, Okla., Dana Bear emerged from the theater with a complicated mix of emotions.Bear, who is an Osage artist and birth worker, felt the horror of witnessing the murders of her people onscreen. But she also felt a sense of deep relief: For years, Bear had told stories of those murders to her children — tales of poisoned relatives and sleepless nights and charred homes — bearing the burden of that tragic history and passing it on to the next generation.“Now, we don’t have to carry these stories anymore,” she said. “Now, the whole world knows what happened to us.”Bear is one of many Indigenous people who came away deeply affected by Martin Scorsese’s searing film, based on the 1920s Reign of Terror in Oklahoma, when dozens of oil-rich Osage were killed by their white neighbors. The murders were part of a wide conspiracy led by William Hale, played in the film by Robert De Niro. Those he enlisted included his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a World War I veteran who married Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a wealthy Osage woman.The film, which garnered seven Golden Globes nominations on Monday, has divided Indigenous viewers: In a dozen interviews, many of them, particularly members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, welcomed the movie, applauding Scorsese for his meticulous portrayal of Osage culture and noting the ways the critically acclaimed drama has broadened awareness of the killings. But other Indigenous viewers said the movie was told from a white man’s perspective and lacked sufficient context about the U.S. government’s complicity in the murders.An oil strike in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Some critics say the movie fails to deal with the role the federal government played in the Reign of Terror. AppleTV+“It still felt to me like it was a story about the white men,” said Tim Landes, who is Cherokee and an editor for TulsaPeople magazine. “It was still framed around the criminals who did the bad deeds.” He said he wished the movie had been created by an Indigenous artist.“There are numerous Indigenous filmmakers, especially in Oklahoma, who are just anxiously awaiting their shot,” he said.There seems to be broad agreement in Indigenous circles that the drama succeeded in accurately portraying the culture and language of the Osage people. Scorsese and his production team took great pains to incorporate Osage feedback into the movie, community members said. In 2019, several years into the making of the movie, Scorsese and his crew met with more than 200 Osage people, discussing tribe members’ concerns about the movie and asking them questions about their lives.“My position always was let’s make sure we’re not going to be stereotyped as Hollywood always does,” said Geoffrey Standing Bear, principal chief of the Osage Nation. “Let’s make sure our story to be told by us as much as possible. And we did a good job of that. This was a movie where you hear the Osage language. You hear the sounds of our music.”In an email to The New York Times, Scorsese said, “We felt a great responsibility to get the story right and this is extremely sensitive territory for the Osage.”Dozens of oil-rich Osage were killed by their white neighbors in the 1920s.The movie was filmed in Osage County and Washington County, Okla., and throughout production, Scorsese and his team worked with Osage experts on clothing, language, art and more. Many Osage people also acted as extras.“The way that they were able to consult and really fold in the community gave it its authenticity,” said Addie Roanhorse, who worked in the film’s art department and is a direct descendant of Henry Roan. (Played by William Belleau, he is depicted in the film as having “melancholy” and is killed by one of Hale’s henchmen.)Scorsese, Gladstone and DiCaprio attended many tribal ceremonies to learn more about their traditions, said Gigi Sieke, an Osage member who appears as an extra in the final scene. She remembers the production team going to her grandfather’s 100-year-old house to measure his table and examine the antiques he owned. When she first watched the movie, she was amazed by how closely the film mirrored the customs of her people, from the way they prayed to the minutiae of their clothing.Still, it was often painful to watch the film. Dana Bear said she was depressed for a month after the screening, saddened by the reality of how Osage members had been brutally treated.Growing up, Bear remembered, she saw an elderly man, known to her as “Cowboy,” at grocery stores or gas stations in Fairfax, Okla. It was not until watching the movie that it dawned on her that he was the son of Ernest and Mollie Burkhart.“It’s not the distant past,” she said. “My grandma lived through that. A lot of families left during that time out of fear and you can look around and see where those families left.”While many of the Indigenous people interviewed approved of the film, others said it failed to reckon with the ways the murders had been enabled by the federal government’s systematic oppression of Indigenous people.The film could have included greater context about how the murders were not isolated events but part of a broader history of colonization, said Elizabeth Rule, a Chickasaw Nation member and a professor of critical race, gender and culture studies at American University.“Violence against Indigenous people unfolded in a systematic way across additional communities in different parts of the country,” she said.The movie also shied away from the federal government’s history of capturing Native American land through the allotment system, making it easier for the properties to be transferred to white men, said Robert Warrior, an Osage professor of American literature and culture at the University of Kansas.“It’s not the distant past,” Dana Bear said. “My grandma lived through that.”AppleTV+Other critics say that the film centered the perspective of white men rather than that of Mollie and other Osage people, and that the story could have been better told by an Indigenous filmmaker.“It would take an Osage to tell the story from the Osage perspective,” said Joel Robinson, an Osage member from Kentucky who wrote a viral review of the movie on Letterboxd. “Someone who has never had to come at it from a place of learning and discovery. Someone who has had it embedded in them.”The fault lies with an entertainment industry that continues to elevate white people’s creative choice over those of Indigenous filmmakers, he said. “In the current Hollywood system, there’s no shot that the studio would come in and be like, ‘Oh you’re Osage, do you want to make this movie? Here’s $200 million,’” he said, referring to the reported budget of the film.Scorsese took issue with the contention that “Killers” elevates a white man’s point of view over an Indigenous one. “I can’t really agree that the story is told primarily from a white man’s perspective,” Scorsese said. “I wanted to create a kind of panoramic perspective. There are many interwoven characters and strands in the story. The majority of the white characters are swindlers, thieves and murderers. That includes Ernest and Bill, of course. I think the picture really isn’t from their ‘perspective.’”But Jeremy Charles, a Cherokee filmmaker, said the movie reminded him how much progress was still needed to improve Indigenous representation in cinema.“We’re telling these kinds of stories predominantly through a white colonizer lens is the main issue,” he said. “What I’ve been working on and what many Indigenous filmmakers have been working on is getting more stories told from an Indigenous perspective into the mainstream.”“The world,” he said, “is hungry for our stories.” More