Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) review

World War I veteran Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns to the States to work for his uncle William King Hale (Robert De Niro), a mobster in Oklahoma who pretends to be a friend of the Osage Nation, and is then encouraged to take Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) as his wife; after several people end up dying mysteriously over the discovery of oil in the region, Mollie asks President Coolidge for help, so J. Edgar Hoover of the Bureau of Investigation sends agent Thomas Bruce White Sr. (Jesse Plemons) and a team to look into the tragic deaths.  While it is commendable for trying to highlight the obscene mistreatment of Native Americans (they're even "prescribed alcohol" by a physician), this has Scorsese revisiting his Gangs of New York-era aesthetic, where the performances are overembellished (DiCaprio makes caveman faces similar to Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade), there are few likeable characters (Ernest tries to poison diabetic Mollie's insulin) and it has a grossly oversimplified view of "justice": when the Feds are seen as the flawless heroes like they were in The FBI Story, there's something wrong.  It's a little easy to complain about the three-and-a-half hour running time, but it doesn't do much to remain captivating ... and then it resorts to tired courtroom drama (with Brendan Fraser and John Lithgow as very animated attorneys) in the last act.