Killers of the Flower Moon · reception & legacy

How Killers of the Flower Moon has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Premiered at Cannes 2023 to a nine-minute ovation and rode into awards season as a presumed juggernaut — then went a stunning 0-for-10 at the Oscars, with Lily Gladstone's Best Actress loss to Emma Stone still one of the most relitigated results of the decade. The film's stature hasn't dipped, but its awards shutout has become part of its story.

What's debated

The forever-debate is perspective: should Scorsese have centered Mollie and the Osage rather than DiCaprio's Ernest — with the 206-minute runtime (and the great 'should theatres bring back intermissions?' discourse of 2023) running a close second.

Its footprint

It gave awards season one of its defining moments — Lily Gladstone accepting her Golden Globe partly in the Blackfeet language — and the runtime kicked off a genuine mainstream argument about intermissions returning to cinemas. DiCaprio's dim, jutting-jawed Ernest became instant meme material.

Where it stands

Instantly slotted into the late-Scorsese canon alongside Silence and The Irishman — a Letterboxd heavyweight treated less as a question of 'is it good?' than 'where does it rank?'