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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

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      What to Read After Watching ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

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      Now that the Scorsese epic is on demand, you can catch up with the drama from home, then go down a rabbit hole with our guides.“Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s telling of the terrible history of the killings of at least 60 Osage people in the 1920s by white neighbors who coveted their oil money, has been part of the film conversation since it was first unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival in May. This month, New York Times critics named it their top movie of 2023. Now that it’s available on demand (and is expected to reach streaming later this month), here’s a guide to what to read about the drama:The HistoryThe film is based on David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction best seller of the same title, which examined both the horrifying murder plot and the birth of the F.B.I. The Times said of the book, “It will sear your soul.” Here’s the review.The movie largely jettisons Grann’s F.B.I. angle and focuses on the wealthy Osage woman Mollie Kyle (played by Lily Gladstone); her white husband, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio); and his uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro), the ringleader of the conspiracy. Here’s a rundown of the facts behind the drama.The ProductionInitially the film was going to follow the book more closely and track an F.B.I. agent as he investigated the mystery. But “I think Marty and I just looked at each other and we felt there was no soul to it,” DiCaprio told our columnist Kyle Buchanan. So they started over again. Here’s what the stars and director had to say.In the wedding scene, Mollie wears what looks to be a soldier’s uniform with a tall hat as her bridal outfit. In fact, the look was based on military dress and hewed closely to Osage tradition, according to designers and members of the tribe. Here’s a closer look at the costumes.The film is stocked with cameos from musicians like Jason Isbell, comedians like Tatanka Means and even a filmmaker (we won’t give it away here). Find out who’s who in the cast.The ReactionThe Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, called the film a “heartbreaking masterpiece” and “a true-crime epic that Scorsese — with grace, sorrow and sublime filmmaking clarity — has turned into a requiem for the country.” Here’s the review.The Times’s two film critics both named “Killers of the Flower Moon” the best film of 2023. “Manifest Destiny makes a hell of a gangster movie,” Dargis wrote. And Alissa Wilkinson wrote that Scorsese proceeds “from the firm belief that guilt is generational, just like grief.” Here are their Top 10 lists.DiCaprio’s Burkhart is unlike any Scorsese protagonist because, well, he’s dumb as rocks. And that changes the film in a fundamental way. Here’s a critic’s notebook explaining why.Scorsese has long been identified with ornately edited, violent set pieces. In “The Irishman” and now “Killers,” those flourishes have given way to blunt truth, argues one writer. Learn how Scorsese has rethought violence. More

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      Martin Scorsese’s Unwise Guys

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      From Travis Bickle to the protagonist of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the director has excelled at depicting a certain kind of male antihero.If “Men Without Women” seems painfully apt as a title for Ernest Hemingway’s fiction, the equivalent for Martin Scorsese’s work might be “Men Failing Women.” From “Who’s That Knocking at My Door” to “Killers of the Flower Moon,” for more than 50 years, his movies have been a dismal and heartbreaking primer on what not to do when you love someone. His male protagonists continue to fail their significant others even when given multiple chances to reverse that pattern: a paradigm even more fraught if the protagonist is a white dimwit and his wife a long-suffering Osage. In his welcome to the audience before “Killers” begins, Scorsese confides that his film is deeply personal, and it is, not just because he has always had a keen sense of social injustice but also because of its obsession with the jaw-dropping gap between the man his protagonist wants to be and the man he is. Which helps explain an aspect of the movie that has most puzzled some reviewers: If it is about what happened to the Osage, then why are we spending so much time with a white schnook?Maybe because the self-deluded sinner who wants to repent but refuses to change has been Scorsese’s most persistent and agonized subject. At their most dysfunctional, those figures are so terrifying that they’ve become cultural totems of toxic masculinity — Travis Bickle! Jake La Motta! — as their rage at their inadequacies lacerates everything, including, of course, the women closest to them.Even at their best, Scorsese’s protagonists never want to face certain hard facts, and in their pursuit of a good time, they’re masters of what “Animal House” memorialized as a “really futile and stupid gesture.” It figures that they’re often hoods or hustlers, either with a pool cue or hedge fund. And happily for us, Scorsese has never been able to resist the energy they bring to a movie. “Goodfellas” is peerless at viscerally rendering the appeal of the gangster’s freewheeling heartlessness, and when “Killers” comes closest to that energy — when the two male leads frantically argue over the pea-brained implementation of a murder they’ve arranged — the result is the movie’s most high-spirited comic moment. What we’re confronting in these movies is self-absorption without understanding: the self as an incomprehensible spectacle. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart seems flummoxed by his actions every step of the way, given how much he is sure he loves Lily Gladstone’s Mollie. He tells his uncle that he loves money and women, and Mollie’s a dream combination of both, given her oil wealth. At first his courting goes nowhere, but eventually she is won over — DiCaprio is DiCaprio, after all, even if he does spend the movie in a permanent frown, and she’s also drawn to his honesty when he wryly confesses his own laziness and greed — and the question for the audience becomes why she isn’t acting on his transparent duplicity. One reason might involve the sheer scale of his treachery — he’s betraying her as a part of a conspiracy to murder her entire family, including her, as well as any number of others — but another might be how much when in love we work to deny what we know in the name of faith or hope. After her sister is murdered, Mollie’s voice-over reveals that she keeps her fears at bay by closing her heart and keeping what’s good there. She knows not to trust corrupt doctors with her insulin, but she can’t bring herself to acknowledge Ernest’s role in what is happening. She confides to her priest that she’s afraid to eat in her own house, but when he asks who might want to harm her, she remains silent. When she is discovered at death’s door by F.B.I. agents, even in her extremity she asks, “Where’s my husband?” And if Mollie is the angel on Ernest’s shoulder, his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro) is the devil: playing on Ernest’s humiliation by reminding him that she’s making things harder on him and informing him that she had another husband she has kept secret (as if Hale is aware that a reliable trigger of abusiveness in a Scorsese movie is the murderousness of male jealousy) and finally appearing at Mollie’s bedside so much like the Angel of Death that in her delirium, she asks if he’s real.But this passion play is Ernest’s. Because he insists that he loves Mollie, he therefore would never want to hurt her, and therefore can’t be doing so. As Rob Corddry of “The Daily Show” put it on the subject of Abu Ghraib: “Just because torturing prisoners is something we did, doesn’t mean it’s something we would do.” Which is where the movie’s race politics becomes so brutal as well: Mollie is, after all, not white, and as such even easier to disregard. As his uncle’s plotting gets ever more destructive, Ernest begins to grope his way toward opting out — he hesitates, at least, about contacting the thug tasked with blowing up his sister-in-law’s house with her in it — and the subsequent long shot of the devastation he confronts afterward works nicely as a figure for his inner life. By administering the insulin he has poisoned, he can simultaneously enact his love and eradicate the problem she poses to his sense of himself as not an awful man. In the same way, he caves to his uncle’s demand that he sign the insurance policy on his own life; he knows what it implies but resolves to act as though he doesn’t. Like so many of Scorsese’s sinners, he wants to do penance, and so drinks the drug he has been adding to Mollie’s insulin, while the fires of hell apparently burn outside (fields set afire, also the work of Uncle Hale).Jesse Plemons’s F.B.I. agent Tom White, the main figure of rectitude, finally says to Ernest, “You’re a good man, Ernest, and you love your wife and children.” He continues, “I don’t think this is how your life was meant to turn out,” and reminds him that his uncle has done nothing except make him do bad things and take advantage of him because of his disposition, that last noun reminding us of both his flaws and his agency. After he finally testifies, in Mollie’s presence, to most of what he has done, in the movie’s most excruciating scene, the couple are given time in a room, and DiCaprio and Gladstone are spectacularly good at what direness can pass between a married couple even if they love each other. She waits for him to come clean, and he won’t. She asks if he has told her the whole truth. He answers he has. She has to keep pressing — What did he give her, in her insulin? What was in the shots? — and though he is demolished by her pain and his guilt, he won’t confess. Her face hardens, and she leaves. Scorsese’s movies have persistently left their protagonists in this semi-disingenuous state of sitting clueless amid the rubble. From Jimmy Doyle to Ace Rothstein to Howard Hughes, however much they intermittently adore their women, they find themselves gaping at the pain they’ve caused as if through the wrong end of a telescope. Their regard, when they feel it, is intense, but in the male-dominated world of striving they inhabit, that regard evaporates periodically, and they’re baffled if not enraged to be called on that. They’re indemnified by their knowledge of who they meant to be, and that ideal self becomes the version they stridently defend. Just because torturing prisoners is something we did … The last time we see Ernest, he’s still pitching between self-pity and self-awareness. He is in that same maddening state in which “Raging Bull” left Jake La Motta, who at one point manages to figure it out: “I’ve done a lot of bad things, Joey. Maybe it’s comin’ back to me.” Source photographs for illustration above: Apple TV+; Getty Images.Jim Shepard has written eight novels, including most recently “Phase Six” and “The Book of Aron,” which won the PEN/New England Award for fiction and the Clark Fiction Prize. He teaches at Williams College. More

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      Leonardo DiCaprio Plays Dim in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

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      Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest is unlike any Scorsese protagonist because, well, he’s dumb as rocks. And that changes the film in a fundamental way.The demimondes depicted by the American master Martin Scorsese vary widely — his New York stories alone span three centuries — but they have one common requirement: It takes intelligence, of one kind or another, to navigate them. His protagonists are smart, street smart, shrewd, skillful or some combination of those qualities as a rule.That rule is broken in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Normally, a character like Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) — a World War I veteran turned henchman in a plot to murder Osage people for their oil profits in 1920s Oklahoma — would either rise to the top of his uncle Bill Hale’s organization, or wise up and fight to stop it on his own. Ernest does neither, precisely because he lacks the qualities Scorsese has spent a lifetime depicting.Henry Hill (Ray Liotta with Lorraine Bracco) serves as our guide to the Mafia in “Goodfellas.”Warner Bros.The quintessential Scorsese protagonist, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) also serves as the narrator of “Goodfellas.” It’s not just that he is a canny operator who helps plan a fictional version of the most lucrative heist in American history — his voice and his street smarts guide us through the Mafia’s underground society. It’s difficult to imagine Ernest having the know-how to pull off either task.DiCaprio in “Gangs of New York.” To survive, his character has to think fast.Ernest is not the first DiCaprio character to live a double life in Scorsese’s world. Amsterdam Vallon and Billy Costigan, his characters in “Gangs of New York” and “The Departed,” are undercover agents embedded in sophisticated crime organizations. They must think on their feet much faster than a man whose only task is to swindle a sick woman.DiCaprio in “The Aviator” as Howard Hughes, a leader more typical of a Scorsese protagonist.Miramax FilmsIn his more antiheroic roles for Scorsese, DiCaprio has played leaders like the tycoon Howard Hughes (“The Aviator”) and the stock scammer Jordan Belfort (“The Wolf of Wall Street”), rather than stooges like Ernest.“Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro with Sharon Stone) dealt with various risks in “Casino.”Universal PicturesSam Rothstein, a.k.a. Ace (Robert De Niro), the mob-associated gambling executive in “Casino,” and Jesus of Nazareth (Willem Dafoe) in “The Last Temptation of Christ” are also leaders, ones who operate under great personal physical risk at that. Their very different lives routinely present them with challenges the likes of Ernest could never surmount.Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer as a couple figuring out their position in a stratified society.Philip Caruso/Columbia PicturesThe same goes for Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) from “The Age of Innocence.” Their doomed romance forces them to navigate the societal mores of wealth and status, with no all-powerful figure like King Hale (De Niro) to back them up.De Niro as Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver.” He was expert with weapons, if not social cues.Sony PicturesNo one would mistake Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta, the iconic De Niro characters from “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” for geniuses, but each was brilliant in his own way at the application of violence.As a comedian, Rupert Pupkin (De Niro, with Jerry Lewis) isn’t too sharp but he has other skills.20th Century FoxUnlike Bickle or LaMotta, Rupert Pupkin, the painfully unfunny would-be comedian played by De Niro in “The King of Comedy,” is no good at all at his chosen field. However, he successfully carries out a plan to kidnap the talk-show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis) and ransom him for a turn in the spotlight.Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) has seen better days in “After Hours.”Warner BrosPerhaps the closest a Scorsese character gets to Ernest is Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) in the black comedy “After Hours.” Like Ernest, Paul is a man in over his head (Hackett can’t hack it). But he’s an otherwise normal and competent person having one crazy night in downtown Manhattan, not a murderer.Ernest is not an average Joe suffering a series of mishaps, like Hackett. Nor is he able to serve as a Henry Hill-esque narrator-navigator for the criminality of King Hale. He barely seems aware of what’s happening with his own small stake in the wider conspiracy, much less able to explain the entire thing to others. With even the mean success of a normal Scorsese criminal out of reach, Ernest is good for little more than relaying messages about murdering unarmed sick people — a task at which he fails as often as he succeeds — and occasionally chipping in by poisoning his own wife.Indeed, Ernest is too thick — intellectually, emotionally morally — to do much of anything but allow his hand to be forced, first by King, then by the federal agents tasked with taking him down. He never really learns, never really comes clean, never really grasps the monstrousness of what’s happening until it’s too late. He’s just not sharp enough to see it, or to allow himself to be shown. The man is a zero — the mental and moral void into which King Hale’s Osage targets and their allies disappear.The Scorsese movie we get out of him is very different as a result. A sharper character would have implied that it takes some canniness, cunning or charisma to plunder a land and its people. Instead, Ernest shows us that the bigotry and greed that fueled the genocidal campaign against the Osage are ultimately stupid, and the resulting tragedy all the sadder for it. More

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      Martin and Francesca Scorsese, TikTok’s Dynamic Duo

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      The acclaimed director’s daughter, a filmmaker herself, has been peppering her feed with videos of her father, showing a rarely seen side of him.Step aside, Leonardo DiCaprio. Martin Scorsese seems to have found a new muse: Oscar, his daughter Francesca Scorsese’s aptly named miniature schnauzer.In a playful video posted to her TikTok last week, the director — just days before the release of his latest epic, “Killers of the Flower Moon” — conducted a very important, very serious audition with Oscar.After mentioning that he had been making films for nearly 50 years with brilliant actors — including with DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Ellen Burstyn, Michelle Pfeiffer, Margot Robbie — he said he was ready for a change.“I need to find something that I could take further and to another level,” he tells the pup who is sitting motionless across from him on a tufted ottoman. “What that is I’m not quite sure, but I’ve heard some extraordinary things about you.”“Oscar, show me fear,” he says. “Oscar, show me sadness, love, show me love, show me transcendence.” When the pup goes from sitting to lying, Scorsese yells out, “Brilliant! You’ve got the role.”Martin Scorsese with his latest film subject — Oscar, the miniature schnauzer.Francesca ScorseseThe tightly composed scene — which toggles between Scorsese and Oscar in a dimly lit study and tells the story from Oscar’s point of view — was imagined and directed by Francesca, an actress and filmmaker whose short dramatic film “Fish Out of Water” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, was shown at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival and will screen at New York Film Week, which began Wednesday.The camerawork on the TikTok post was done from a low angle, “because Oscar’s kind of small, we thought it was so funny,” Francesca, 23, who is a graduate of New York University Tisch School of the Arts (which her father also attended), told The New York Times on Thursday. “Then when the reveal happens, it makes it a little bit more successful because we were actually experiencing it from Oscar’s position.” (She convinced him to lie down at the end with a piece of chicken, his favorite.)It’s a heartwarming insight into perhaps the most famous living director when he is not behind the camera. (Martin Scorsese was amazed, she said, at the speed in which the scene was edited and available to watch.) It also might introduce Scorsese, 80, to a younger generation who may not technically be old enough to watch his most famous works like “Taxi Driver” (1976), “Cape Fear” (1991) or “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013).It wasn’t his first appearance on Francesca’s TikTok. Amid posts that would be at home on any 23-year-old’s page — a cute video of her scrunching her nose to “You Wish” by Flyana Boss; another of her and a friend getting small tattoos and ear piercings — are several cameos of the elder Scorsese.A few weeks ago, in a post that has been viewed more than two million times, she tested his knowledge of slang terms. He was pretty spot on explaining the meaning of “tea” (“tell all you know”) and “ick” (“thoroughly repulsed”), but thought a “sneaky link” was a “personal peccadillo.” She corrected him: “It’s like a booty call.”They have worked together before, including on a Bleu de Chanel commercial this year with Timothée Chalamet. And Francesca says her father is eager to participate in these social media projects with her and sees value in the medium. “The people that he surrounds himself with keep him pretty young,” she said. “DiCaprio texts him and calls him the GOAT, calls him bro, you know they’re buddies.”When she originally explained the concept for the slang video to him, she used the expression GOAT as an example. “People keep saying that to me. People keep calling me the GOAT, but I don’t know what that means,” she recalled him telling her. It stands for “greatest of all time,” she replied, to which he said, “No way! I had no idea.”The TikTok video of Martin Scorsese guessing slang has been viewed over two million times.Francesca ScorseseIn July, she posted a compilation in appreciation of her father with the caption “He’s a certified silly goose.” The 22-second video, which has been viewed more than two million times, includes snippets of the director snuggling a tiny puppy and laughing hysterically in a tuxedo alongside De Niro and Harvey Keitel.“Fine, I’ll watch one of his movies,” a commenter wrote. “Omg love seeing this side of him,” wrote another.His lighthearted tone in these videos stands in contrast not only to his films, known for their haunting and violent themes, but also to some reflections he has made in his recent interviews. When GQ asked him about his own mortality in September, Scorsese said that he thought about it all the time. “I was a great collector, a great obsessive glutton for cinema and books, and now they all have to go away,” he said. “Once you know that you got to let go and you’re going to die, everything changes.”Providing a full picture of Martin Scorsese to the public is a significant part of why his daughter incorporates him on social media and why, years ago, she encouraged him to start an Instagram account, so the public could not only see him at work but also glimpse family photos and see him with his dogs. There’s also a lesser-seen part of his life, which is his role in caring for his wife and Francesca’s mother, Helen Morris, who has Parkinson’s. “He’s a lot more private about that stuff,” Francesca said. “People would think it’s this luxurious, glitz and glamour lifestyle. But then on the other hand, he’s in and out of hospital visits with her.”Some of that life experience was channeled into “Fish Out of Water,” her thesis film at N.Y.U., which was about a young mother who has an opportunity to reconnect with her estranged family after she is approached by her father with news of her mother’s failing health.While Martin Scorsese first dipped a toe into social media on Instagram, it was the introduction of TikTok that has allowed Francesca to give the world another perspective on her father, she said.“It’s really awesome to see that one of the most incredible filmmakers, he’s not just this big star that people see — I mean, he is — but he’s also a totally normal person that walks around in his pajamas, plays with his dogs and just helps his daughter with her math homework if he can,” she said. “People love seeing that side of him.” More