Photo © Paramount Pictures
Killers of the Flower Moon
Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
Io Sto Bene (I Am Fine)
(IndiePix DVD/Digital)
Antonio is an elderly gentleman when we meet him, but in flashbacks we learn of his hard life as an immigrant. He was one among tens of thousands of “guest workers” from Southern Europe who moved north in the 1950s and ‘60s to find work. Young Antonio thought he’d remain in Luxembourg for a year, sending money home before returning with a small nest egg. Instead, he stayed, rising through hard work to a comfortable retirement.
Elderly Antonio encounters Leo, a young Italian woman trying to find gigs in Luxembourg as a club DJ and videographer. Her college education affords few job openings in Italy. Antonio is recently widowed, Leo is at loose ends after surviving a rape, and the two begin a complicated friendship based on loneliness and need. Director Donato Rotunno’s I Am Fine is a human-scale film, the sort of story Hollywood doesn’t tell anymore. (David Luhrssen)
Killers of the Flower Moon
(In Theaters Oct. 20)
Based on David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name, the biographical drama chronicles a scheme to steal land rich in oil from Native Americans. Set in Oklahoma during the 1920s, Robert De Niro portrays the interloper calling himself King Bill Hale. When the Osage tribe discovers significant oil reserves on their land, Hale poses as their benefactor, helping to build up their town and to they can better enjoy the trappings of their wealth. But beneath his apparent altruism, Hale nurtures a dark plan.
Aided by his nephew Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio), Hale sets about swindling the Indians. He chooses wealthy, and lovely Osage member Mollie (Lily Gladstone), for Ernest will marry. Next, Hale insures that he and Ernest are included on the list of inheritors to the oil rights. Now all Hale must do is get rid of the twenty or so Osage tribespeople standing between him and ownership. One-by-one, the family members are killed, but since local officials and law enforcement are complicit, Hale and Ernest are never caught. Trouble arrives with an FBI agent (Jesse Plemons) assigned to investigate the mounting toll of murders.
The film clocks in at a hefty three-and-a-half hours. It is both broad in scope and intimate when examining Ernest’s relationships with Hale and Mollie. That familiar music is the sound of 80-year-old director, Martin Scorsese, getting the old band back together when casting of De Niro and DiCaprio. The surprise is that Gladstone’s Mollie plays the band’s soulful strains. (Lisa Miller)
The Pigeon Tunnel
(Limited Theatrical & Streaming on AppleTV+, Oct. 20)
Known by his pen name, John le Carré, British author David John Moore Cornwell was born in 1931 to a con man whose influence was magnified by Cornwell’s largely absent mother. Such dubious beginnings aside, Cornwell became a British intelligence officer, an occupation that was fodder for his fertile imagination. During his service, Cornwell penned three espionage thrillers and became popular enough to quit intelligence in order to write full-time.
Hoping to learn about the man behind the author, documentarian Errol Morris, interviewed 89-year-old Cornwell. The filmmaker intercuts their conversation with reenactments from Cornwell’s life and works. Morris seeks to understand the reasons for the moral ambiguity at the center of a le Carré novel. Though masterfully self-aware, Cornwell claims to have no explanation for who or what he is, but his observations and anecdotes make this 95-minute conversation worth the time. (Lisa Miller)
