Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon opened in theaters on Friday, coming in No. 2 at the box office with $23 million in ticket sales, the Associated Press reports.
Grann’s 2017 bestseller tells the story of the FBI’s investigation of a series of slayings in the 1920s in which Osage people in Oklahoma were targeted. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the book as a “gripping account of pitiless evil.”
Scorsese’s adaptation features a starry cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, and Tantoo Cardinal. Moviegoers flocked to the highly anticipated three-and-a-half-hour film over the weekend—but not enough to topple the concert movie Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour from its No. 1 spot.
Reviews of Killers of the Flower Moon have been largely, but not uniformly, positive; it has a 92% “fresh” rating among critics at the website Rotten Tomatoes. On NPR’s All Things Considered, Bob Mondello said, “Along with sweeping vistas, rampant criminality and gaslit marital melodrama, the film is a gangster tale of greed, racism, lies and violence. It is, in short, American history.”
But David Rapp of Kirkus was not impressed by the adaptation, criticizing DiCaprio’s “scowling, twitchy performance” and observing that the film focused too little on its Osage characters. The “real story” behind the film, he wrote, is “drowned out by white noise.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
