Film

Killers of the Flower Moon

Scorsese's late-period epic is a slow, appalled unspooling of a real conspiracy: white settlers marrying into and then murdering the Osage Nation for oil money. It's less thriller than tragedy — patient, mournful, told partly through Mollie Gladstone's eyes rather than the murderers'. Three and a half hours of quiet dread, gorgeous plains cinematography, and a moral reckoning that never lets you off the hook.

TMDb rating7.4

If you liked this

There Will Be Blood2007

Another American origin story about oil turning a man into a monster, with Daniel Day-Lewis doing career-best work as a prospector whose greed metastasizes into something biblical. Same appetite, same land, same rot.

But It's cold and punishing by design — there's no Mollie here to give you somewhere warm to look.

There Will Be Blood poster

No Country for Old Men2007

The Coens' Western noir shares Scorsese's interest in violence as an ordinary, almost bureaucratic fact of American life, and Tommy Lee Jones's weary lawman rhymes with Tom White's dogged pursuit of justice.

But Bleaker and more elliptical — it denies you the catharsis of an arrest or a verdict.

No Country for Old Men poster

GoodFellas1990

De Niro and Scorsese, decades earlier, doing a different kind of American conspiracy — charismatic, funny, seductive right up until it isn't. Watch it to see how far both men have travelled since.

But It's exhilarating where Flower Moon is grieving; the tonal whiplash might feel wrong right after.

GoodFellas poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Reservation Dogs2021

Same land, same community's history of loss — but told from inside by the people Flower Moon can only depict from outside, in a completely different emotional key.

Written and directed largely by Indigenous creators, this is funny, tender, and set on Oklahoma land not far in spirit from the Osage story — but it's about kids who inherited that history and are figuring out how to live now, not just grieve.

But Comedy-drama on a much smaller, gentler scale — episodes are twenty minutes, not built for sweep or dread.

Reservation Dogs poster
More like this (8)

The Irishman2019

Scorsese and De Niro's other late-career epic about complicity, loyalty and a quiet man doing terrible things for people he loves. If the pacing here worked for you, this is more of that same patient dread.

But Similarly enormous runtime and similarly unhurried — not a palate cleanser, more of the same medicine.

The Irishman poster

Chinatown1974

The template for American conspiracy-noir: water instead of oil, Los Angeles instead of Oklahoma, but the same machinery of powerful men quietly rearranging a landscape and the people on it for profit.

But It's tighter and colder, a puzzle-box thriller rather than a mournful epic — different pleasures entirely.

Chinatown poster

Wind River2017

A contemporary murder mystery on a Native reservation that shares Flower Moon's fury at how routinely violence against Indigenous women goes uninvestigated. Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen carry real anger underneath the procedural.

But More conventional thriller mechanics — it wants to grip you where Scorsese wants to sit you with grief.

Wind River poster

Hell or High Water2016

A lean, modern Western about economic desperation, land, and the law arriving too late to matter, with a Comanche deputy whose weary commentary on stolen land echoes straight through from 1920s Oklahoma.

But Much smaller in scope and ambition — a tight modern crime film, not a historical reckoning.

Hell or High Water poster

Boardwalk Empire2010

If it's the 1920s texture you're craving — bootleggers, backroom deals, a country building its wealth on things it won't admit to — this gives you five seasons to live in that era's corruption.

But It's a sprawling gangster soap, not a true story with a moral weight behind every scene.

Boardwalk Empire poster

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford2007

A hushed, painterly Western about betrayal from within, told at Flower Moon's unhurried pace. If you loved sitting in that slowness, this rewards the same patience.

But Even slower and more interior — a mood piece more than a story, and it demands total attention.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford poster

Get Out2017

Both are marriages-as-traps: an outsider absorbed into a family that has already decided how his life will end, for the family's benefit.

Jordan Peele's horror movie runs the exact same engine as Flower Moon — a man marries into a family whose warmth conceals a plan to consume him — but flips the racial direction and turns the dread into genre spectacle.

But It's a horror movie with jump scares and a satirical edge; treating a real atrocity as a structural cousin to it may feel uncomfortable to some.

Get Out poster

Devil's Doorway1950no page yet

The same fundamental crime — land and law weaponized against Native ownership — dramatized in classic Hollywood Western form, twenty years before revisionist Westerns made it fashionable to notice.

A studio-era Western, decades before Hollywood was supposed to care, about a Shoshone war hero fighting to keep his own land from being legally stolen out from under him. Robert Taylor plays it with real weight for its time.

But Dated production values and a white lead cast as a Native protagonist — a product of its moment in ways that will grate.

People

Cast

Directing

Writing

Production

Recommended by