Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon received a nine-minute standing ovation at Cannes on Saturday, 20 May.
The crowd that filled the 3,200-seat Grand Theatre Lumiere responded pretty well to the iconic director who first came to the festival with a little film called Taxi Driver that won the Palme d’Or a full 47 years ago.
Critics have been hailing the sweeping American epic which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone and Robert De Niro and stretches to a running time of three and a half hours, as a “masterpiece”.
The US director’s latest work is an adaptation of David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller based on the Osage murders in 1920s Oklahoma and cost streaming service Apple $200 million to make.
The Wrap writes that if Cannes is the palace of cinema, Scorsese is royalty who can stand alongside Fellini, Godard, Kurosawa, Bergman and a few others. And Killers of the Flower Moon has the feel of a late-career opus of the first magnitude, so the Cannes audience was unreserved in its enthusiasm for him and for the extraordinary lineup of stars he brought with him, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio for starters.
It was undoubtedly the most anticipated movie to premiere at Cannes this year, and has, according to the majority of early reviews, lived up to the high expectations.
Following the screening, Scorsese, 80, and his cast were met with a standing ovation and loud cheers from attendees, among whom were stars including Cate Blanchett, Salma Hayek, Isabelle Huppert, and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
“We shot this a couple of years ago in Oklahoma. It’s taken its time to come around but Apple did so great by us,” Scorsese said, addressing the crowd after the screening. “There was lots of grass. I’m a New Yorker.”
In a five-star review for The Independent, critic Clarisse Loughrey observed how Killers of the Flower Moon carries Scorsese’s “tradition fixations: the rotted core of man’s heart; how power breeds the impulse for destruction; the myths of cowboys and outlaws and the dirty truth to them”.
She also singled out Gladstone’s performance as Mollie Kyle, who marries DiCaprio’s character Ernest Burkhart, as “one of the most extraordinary… by a woman in any of Scorsese’s movies.”
