With today’s Best Film win at NYFCC, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is now very much in the race to win the Oscar for Best Picture. The only film currently standing in its way also happens to be the frontrunner, and that’s “Oppenheimer.”
How great is it to potentially have an awards season with Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan going head to head. Their films deserve all the love that they’re going to be getting these next few weeks.
”Killers of the Flower Moon” is richly atmospheric and character-driven to a tee. What ‘Killers’ does is hold and fascinate you in a step-by-step fashion, and it radiates profound moral grief and heartache.
It’s three hours of scheming and murder, edited via multiple different genres — romance, western, whodunit. The way Scorsese tells the story is also rather unconventional. You’re never sure where the story is headed or why, nothing is obvious.
What ‘Killers’ amounts to is a real and lived in world and it’s absolute fire-in-your-belly cinema. It’s also very measured and matter of fact in its clinical execution. It’s one of Scorsese’s steadiest, and most methodical depictions of morally toxic individuals.
“Oppenheimer” is Nolan’s boldest, most dense film and one that comes into clearer focus on subsequent viewings. I’ve seen in three times and it only gets better as a film.
Even at three hours, the amount of story that Nolan packs into “Oppenheimer” cannot enough convey everything that he has to say. “Oppenheimer” closely resembles “Dunkirk” in the way it manages to weave countless storyline structures into this magnificent whole.
This is a messy, sprawling, operatic statement from Nolan. It’s also technically masterful. Incredibly exciting to behold, a mosaic of intellectual cinema drenched onto the screen. There’s so much going on, in almost every frame, that it’d be foolish for one to believe that he or she can fully grasp it in just a single viewing. I can’t wait to see it again.
Here’s your chance to chime in. I gather many of you have seen both films, hopefully on the big screen — which one deserves it more? Both are 3+ hour epics with some of the finest filmmaking of the year, but what’s been the bigger achievement?
I’d have to give a slight edge to Scorsese’s film. Don’t get me wrong, both ‘Killers’ and “Oppenheimer” have flaws to them, but their ambitions and the risks they take are soaringly exciting. Forget about “Barbie,” both of these films marked the year in American cinema.