It took nearly two and a half years, but Scorsese’s $200 million epic finally has a home on American shelves. That alone starts this Killers of the Flower Moon 4K review with a fairy-tale ending.

Making the film was another story. Apple stepped in when Paramount balked at the size of Scorsese’s budget, and stateside the film lived on Apple TV+ after a far too brief run in cinemas. This was a movie I wished more people had experienced on the big screen, long running time and all. Until March 2026, collectors had to import the 4K from an Italian boutique label. I had a hunch Criterion would eventually get its hands on it, so I saved my lire and waited.

Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio,The Wolf of Wall Street) comes home from the First World War and goes to work for his uncle, rancher William King Hale (Robert De Niro, Backdraft). Hale plays the kindly friend of the Osage while steering Ernest toward Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone, The Wedding Banquet). Her family holds valuable headrights in the area, and nobody is fooled about why Hale cares.

DiCaprio plays against his own star power, allowing Ernest to be weak, greedy and sincerely in love all at once. Four years after The Irishman, De Niro is even scarier here without ever needing to raise his voice. In this town, evil shakes your hand, asks about your family and calls itself your friend. Gladstone, though, is one of the reasons the film’s enormous running time never feels like a drag. Her Mollie is sly, funny and watchful, and Scorsese trusts her silences more than most directors trust a monologue. The role made her the first Native American nominated for Best Actress, and I would have loved to see her win.

That focus on Mollie, Ernest and Hale is also where Scorsese makes his biggest departure from David Grann’s 2017 book. Grann tracked the still-young Federal Bureau of Investigation through a wave of 1920s killings in oil-rich Osage County, with a major portion of the book devoted to the birth of the FBI and agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons, The Power of the Dog) coming in to untangle the conspiracy. Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth turn that procedural on its head, pushing White to the edges and keeping the spotlight on the Osage people and the relationships already poisoned from within. The result feels less like a mystery waiting to be solved and more like a domestic tragedy whose outcome we can see coming long before anyone arrives to stop it.

It isn’t flawless. The middle hour circles its dread a few laps too many, and the federal investigation arrives late by design. Plemons brings an easy calm to Agent White, giving him a presence even when it feels as though he has wandered in from another version of the movie. This is also where the repeated violence against Osage women becomes especially difficult to endure. There is a fair question about how often those acts need to be shown before depicting historical brutality begins to risk dwelling on it. Scorsese never treats the violence casually, but he doesn’t let us look away from it, either. The horror isn’t a twist. It’s arithmetic, and the whole town is in on the math.

This is one of Scorsese’s most staggering films, an epic about greed that becomes more sickening the more ordinary that greed appears. And just when you think he’s shown you every card he’s holding, he closes with a finale so strange, sad and self-aware that it completely reframes how the story itself has been packaged and consumed. After more than three hours, Scorsese still has one last surprise waiting, and it took my breath away.