Review: 'The Marvels' is a quick-witted and funny entry in the MCU, topped by Iman Vellani's gleeful Ms. Marvel

There are few storytelling ideas more naturally absurd than superheroes — so it’s always been strange that the Marvel Cinematic Universe doesn’t really lean into full-out comedy. 

Certainly, the MCU isn’t as morose as the DC Comics movies have been, either the urban dystopia of Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy or the bloated self-importance of everything between “Man of Steel” and “Justice League” that didn’t prominently feature Gal Gadot. And sure, there’s plenty of humor, or stabs at it, in such recent Marvel titles as “Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “Thor: Love and Thunder,” and going all the way back to Robert Downey Jr.’s sarcasm in the first “Iron Man” — but that’s bro-heavy action-movie humor.

But with the possible exception of 2017’s “Thor: Ragnarok,” Marvel hasn’t gotten as consistently funny and light-hearted as it does in “The Marvels,” director Nia DaCosta’s rollicking and charmingly ridiculous variation on Marvel’s superhero action genre.

Something weird is happening around the galaxy, and it’s managed to ensnare three of Marvel’s finest — Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), astronaut Capt. Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Harris), and teen Kamala Khan, alias Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani). It’s why Carol, fighting Kree soldiers a long way from Earth, suddenly is zapped into Kamala’s bedroom closet in Jersey City, while Kamala finds herself in a space suit floating outside a space station helmed by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson).

After a few mishaps and sudden shifts, a pattern emerges. It’s tied to the fact that all three heroes use light energy in their superpowers, and something is causing them to swap places when they use their powers at the same time. The cause of this disruption in the space-time continuum is a Kree, Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), who is using the galaxy’s space portal network to destroy various planets and get revenge on Captain Marvel — for reasons that I won’t spoil.

DaCosta — who directed Parris in “Candyman” — shares the writing credit with Megan McDonnell, a staff writer for Marvel’s TV series “WandaVision” (which introduced Monica), and Elissa Karasik, a writer both for “Loki” and the Apple TV+ miniseries “Lessons in Chemistry” (which stars Larson). The three put a fun spin on the traditional superhero antics, mainly with the switcheroo scenario, both for comic effect when the trio are haphazardly swapping places and (after the coolest training montage the MCU has ever done) when they get their act together as a smooth fighting unit.

Larson and Parris are solid, but the star of the show is young Vellani — who, to be fair, also was amazing in her “Ms. Marvel” TV series. Vellani plays Kamala as a stalwart superhero, but she’s also a goofy 16-year-old who goes from seriously fangirling on Captain Marvel to respecting her and Monica as friends and universe-saving colleagues. If “The Marvels” generates more movies for the MCU, here’s hoping Vellani’s Kamala Khan is in the middle of them.

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‘The Marvels’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for action/violence and brief language. Running time: 105 minutes.

Review: 'Priscilla,' with a star-making performance by Cailee Spaeny, shows the luxurious cage of being married to Elvis

Sometimes biopic subjects get the director they need.

Elvis Presley got Baz Luhrmann, whose flamboyance and excess matched The King’s sequined swagger perfectly in “Elvis.” Conversely, the life of Priscilla Presley, the young bride of Elvis, who was hidden away like a canary in a gilded cage, is a good fit for Sofia Coppola in the beautifully rendered “Priscilla.”

The movie starts in West Germany in September 1959, when the 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu (played by Cailee Spaeny) talks her dad (Ari Cohen), an U.S. Air Force captain, and mom, Ann (Dagmara Dominczyk), into letting her attend a party. She knows that someone will be attending that party: Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi), 24 and already a star, though at this point he’s serving in the Army — which, as Luhrmann’s movie told us, was the suggestion of his manager, Col. Tom Parker, as a way to improve his bad-boy image.

Priscilla becomes smitten with Elvis, and seemingly vice versa — though within the restrictions of her parents, which the courtly Elvis appears to follow. By the following March, Elvis’ military service is over and he goes back home. Priscilla, seeing the movie magazine items about Elvis making out with Nancy Sinatra, thinks her brief flirtation with him is over.

But they stay in touch by phone — and in 1962, he invites her to a two-week trip in Los Angeles, where Elvis is filming a movie, and her parents agree. On a later trip, in March 1963, she goes to Graceland, Elvis’ mansion in Memphis, permanently, with her parents’ stipulation that Priscilla attend a Catholic high school to get her diploma, and that eventually she and Elvis get married.

Early on, the movie depicts how Elvis gave Priscilla amphetamines and sleeping pills so she could keep up with his hectic pace of performing and partying. Coppola also shows how Priscilla would stay at Graceland while Elvis went on the road with his buddies or to Hollywood — where the tabloids would report on Elvis’ romantic dalliances with the likes of Ann-Margret, and when Priscilla confronted Elvis, he would always deny the stories and say they were planted for the sake of publicity. (As the movie tells it — and Coppola’s script is based on Priscilla Presley’s memoir, and Priscilla is one of the film’s executive producers, so it’s her sanitized version of history — Elvis and Priscilla did not have sex until after they were married in 1967.) 

Coppola and cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd (who shot Coppola’s “The Beguiled”) capture the sumptuous surroundings of Priscilla’s life in Graceland — with ‘60s and ‘70s details meticulously rendered by production designer Tamara Deverell (“Nightmare Alley”). But Coppola, as she did in “Marie Antoinette,” shows this luxury to be a trap, a hideaway where Priscilla is kept like a beloved pet, but then left behind when Elvis wanders elsewhere.

Coppola’s hardest limitation here is the lack of cooperation of Elvis Presley Enterprises, the corporate entity (founded by Priscilla, ironically) that controls every aspect of the rock star’s image. EPE denied the movie the use of Presley’s music — so Coppola took a different tack, employing her husband, Thomas Mars, and his band Phoenix to be music supervisors, picking period songs with great care (with the grating exception of the last song in the movie, which is chronologically off but emotionally too on-the-nose).

The most fascinating part of “Priscilla” is watching Spaeny (“Bad Times at the El Royale,” “The Craft: Legacy”) go through the phases of Priscilla’s life, from 14 to 27, so naturally and sensitively. It’s a star-making performance, and one that gives Coppola’s account its emotional weight.

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‘Priscilla’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 3, in theaters. Rated R for drug use and some language. Running time: 113 minutes.

Review: 'Rustin' shines a light on a hidden figure of the civil rights movement, and gives Colman Domingo a worthy stage to perform

“Rustin” is a movie that’s almost as good as its intentions — which are in the stratosphere, thanks to its subject matter (the civil rights movement) and two of its executive producers (Barack and Michelle Obama, through their Higher Ground Productions).

The title figure is Bayard Rustin, a champion of the civil rights struggle who has not gotten his props until recently. Colman Domingo, recently stealing scenes in “Zola” and “Candyman,” plays Rustin with a cagey mix of flamboyance and world-weariness. He’s been beaten in his life — he’s missing several teeth on his right side from a cop’s nightstick after sitting in the front of a bus as a young man — but not beaten down. He remains resilient, working alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Aml Ameen) through the 1950s, in the battle to make segregation go away as the Supreme Court said it should.

The movie starts in 1960, when King and Rustin are on opposite sides of a dispute with the hierarchy of the NAACP — most notably the group’s executive director, Roy Wilkins (Chris Rock), who finds Rustin too loud and, though he won’t say the word, too gay to be a public voice in the movement. Rustin thinks King will have his back, and when he doesn’t, there’s a falling out that lasts for three years.

We cut ahead those three years, to 1963, with Rustin floundering in an anti-war group, and seeing the younger Black activists tired of the nonviolence he and King espouse. At a party, one of those young men confronts Rustin, saying, “you’re irrelevant.” Rustin replies laconically, “It’s Friday night — I’ve been called worse.”

Then Rustin has a brainstorm: A two-day march, 100,000 people strong, in Washington, D.C., to demand of Congress and the White House movement on a comprehensive civil rights law. He gathers some eager young activists to help flesh out the idea into a plan. Rustin soon realizes that he will need the NAACP’s support, and to get that — as his old friend, the activist Ella Baker (Audra McDonald), tells him — he needs to make peace with King.

Rustin convinces King to climb on board because he knows this will be the chance, and the place, for King to secure his legacy. And he’s right — because that march in 1963, culminating at the Lincoln Memorial, is where King delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech. (It’s not a spoiler if it’s history.)

Screenwriters Justin Breece and Dustin Lance Black each bring different elements to the mix. Breece, who wrote episodes of Ava DuVernay’s miniseries “When They See Us,” channels the passions of the civil rights era — particularly capturing the specific moment when Rustin’s generation was feeling like the old guard and grandstanders, like Congressman Adam Clayton Powell (Jeffrey Wright), were challenging that guard. Black, an Oscar winner for “Milk,” highlights the less public part of Rustin’s identity, his homosexuality, with a subplot involving a closeted minister (Johnny Ramey) and several speeches peppered through the narrative, some soaring and others sounding like Black is trying to be the next Aaron Sorkin.

Director George C. Wolfe (who put August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” on the screen) is, at heart, a theater guy — and he recognizes that the heart and soul of “Rustin” is intertwined with the theatricality and bravado of Bayard Rustin. Wolfe collaborates with Domingo to bring those qualities, like his rapid-fire wit and silver tongue, front and center. Wolfe provides the platform, and Domingo supplies the fireworks.

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‘Rustin’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 3, in theaters; starts streaming November 17 on Netflix. Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some violence, sexual material, language including racial slurs, brief drug use, and smoking. Running time: 106 minutes.

Review: 'The Persian Version' is a fresh and funny story of an Iranian American trying to reconcile her various identities with her tough-as-nails mom

Sometimes a movie takes a few minutes to settle down and find its groove — which is what happens with “The Persian Version,” writer-director Maryam Keshavarz’s warm-hearted and regularly hilarious look at a woman trying to reconcile conflicting cultures and a hard case of a mom.

“Obviously, I’ve had some issues with culture,” are the first words we hear from Leila (Layla Mohammadi) — after we see her entering a Halloween party in half a burqa with a neon-pink bikini under it. “Can you blame me? I come from two countries that used to be madly in love with each other.” Those countries are the United States and Iran, and needless to say, the breakup was epically bad.

Leila explains how her father took the family from Iran to America in the ‘60s, to be a doctor in Brooklyn, and stayed after the revolution back home. Leila was the youngest of nine children, and the only girl — and a constant disappointment to her mother (Niousha Noor). Part of that attitude comes from the fact that Leila is a lesbian, recently divorced because she wanted to pursue her filmmaking career rather than settle down and have kids.

When her father (Bijan Daneshmand) goes into the hospital for a long-awaited heart transplant, and all the brothers go to sit with him, Mom demands that Leila stay home and tend to her grandmother, Mamanjoon (Bella Warda). This turns out to be propitious, because Mamanjoon lets slip that Leila’s parents left Iran because of “the scandal.” Of course, Leila is dying to know what the scandal was — and whether it helps explain why her mother is the way she is.

Keshavarz, whose 2011 Iran-centered lesbian drama “Circumstance” won the Audience Award for U.S. Dramatic films at Sundance, returns with an exuberant, Technicolor celebration of family — as Leila learns her family’s hidden history and finds connections to her own chaotic life. Leila is often told, “You’re just like your mother,” and even though she denies it vociferously, even she can’t deny the parallels. The story is based on Keshavarz’s own family story, which gives the movie a lived-in authenticity.

Mohammadi is a stunning discovery, beautiful and sharp and wickedly funny, and she commands the movie. She’s nicely matched with Noor and Warda, representing three generations of fierce and loving women — embodying the family bonds that make “The Persian Version” so charming.

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‘The Persian Version’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 3, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language and some sexual references. Running time: 106 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 26, 2023, when the movie premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Five Nights at Freddy's' is mostly for the franchise's fans, but has a few scares for the rest of us

The not-too-messy horror thriller “Five Nights at Freddy’s” grapples with the same problem any movie based on a popular franchise does: How much effort will go into satisfying the fans of the property? And how far will the filmmakers go to bring the uninitiated along for the ride?

In this case, the seesaw definitely tips toward fan service, though there are some horror pleasures that anyone can appreciate.

The movie starts with Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), a guy who needs a job to keep himself and his kid sister, Abby (Piper Rubio), fed and sheltered — and to keep their scheming Aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson) from taking custody of Abby. Mike has a complicated routine to get to sleep each night, which we learn has to do with a childhood incident when his little brother, Garrett (Lucas Grant), was kidnapped during a camping trip and was never seen again. 

When he sees a career counselor (Matthew Lillard), he reluctantly accepts the one job offered: Night security guard at a long-closed arcade, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. When Mike starts his first night, he he encounters the weirdness of the place, in the form of animatronic figures performing ‘80s pop music. It’s up to Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), a cop patrolling the area, who fills in more of the story — of how Freddy’s was shut down after five children there disappeared.

The children soon show up in Mike’s dreams, and Mike thinks they might be able to help him figure out what happened to Garrett. But the price of finding out could involve losing Abby.

Like many people, my familiarity with the source material, the “Five Nights at Freddy’s” video game franchise started by Scott Cawthon, is through my kids. They don’t play the horror game, which is infamous for its random jump scares, but they watch YouTube game players walking through the game (and its sequels).

Director Emma Tammi (who made the unsettling 2018 frontier horror drama “The Wind”), who shares screenwriting credit with Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback, squeezes out some frights in one sequence in the early part of the movie — when some hooligans try to rob Freddy’s and encounter the menacing robots. The rest of the movie is more about the psychological horror, and only succeeds fitfully at building that tension.

On a technical level, the movie is a curiosity, thanks to the animatronic work by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, which gives Freddy and his pals a tactile menace that computer-animated monsters wouldn’t be able to replicate. 

The best way to enjoy “Five Nights at Freddy’s” is to go when there’s an audience made up of the game’s fans — in part because it’s fun to hear them react at the numerous in-jokes peppered through the movie. (For example, an overly cheerful diner waiter is played by Matthew Patrick, aka MatPat, one of those YouTube stars.) It’s one of those horror movies that is more fun in a crowd.

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‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 27, in theaters, and streaming on Peacock. Rated PG-13 for strong violent content, bloody images and language. Running time: 110 minutes.

Review: 'The Mission' recounts, with remarkable even-handedness, a young Christian's fatal attempt to preach to an isolated people

There’s a nice sense of irony, or maybe karma, in the documentary “The Mission,” the story of a young Christian missionary whose zealous pursuit of his purpose led to his death — because, like this young man in his rowboat, the viewer also has to account for what they are bringing with them as they watch.

The facts of the case are these: In November 2018, John Chau, an American man of Chinese heritage, was killed on North Sentinel Island off the coast of India — a place where the Indigenous hunter-gatherers live without contact from outsiders, and react to intruders with bows and arrows.

Directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, a married couple whose previous movie was the 2020 documentary “Boys State,” spend the bulk of the movie showing us how Chau got there, physically and spiritually. The movie traces the origins of his evangelical fervor, and how he found mentors — particularly a mission organizer at Oral Roberts University (who was not interviewed for the film) — who encouraged him to bring Jesus’ story to all people everywhere.

McBaine and Moss interview several people who knew Chau: High school friends, college instructors, National Park Service employees he worked with, and a couple of pastors. 

There are two interviews with people who didn’t know Chau. One, Adam Goodheart, an author who wrote about the Sentinelese — and once got close enough to the island to feel an arrow fly past him. The other is Daniel Everett, a linguist who as a young missionary in 1978 lived among the Pirahã people of the Amazon, and now warns against the presumption that Westerners can give isolated groups anything that they want or need.

Two other voices are prominent, and they belong to actors speaking over animation. One reads excerpts from a letter written by Chau’s father to the filmmakers. The other reads passages from Chau’s journals, which his family allowed the filmmakers to make public.

There are many ways to think about Chau. Was he a reckless young man who ignored repeated warnings — and Indian law — by attempting to set foot on the island? Was he a selfish and arrogant Westerner who thought he knew what the Sentinelese needed better than they did? Was he brainwashed by the evangelical Christian leaders he met?

The fascinating thing about “The Mission” is that McBaine and Moss are astonishingly even-handed, allowing for all those perspectives to be given consideration. Then it’s up to the viewer to sort out which version of Chau seems most likely — and, at the same time, consider their own biases about faith, colonialism and free will.

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‘The Mission’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 27, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for full nudity, some violent content, thematic elements and sexual references. Running time: 103 minutes.

Review: 'After Death' is a documentary about near-death experiences that's only for those who already believe

Ambiguity is the space where good documentaries thrive — that limbo where the truth is unknowable, and the filmmakers present the possibilities and let the viewer to make up their minds. Ambiguity is also something from which the makers of “After Death” flee as fast as their faith-based re-enactments can carry them.

As the title tells us, the subject here is what happens when people die — the ultimate unknowable, since people who have died don’t return their text messages. Directors Stephen Gray and Chris Radtke have to settle for talking to people who have had near-death experiences (which happens often enough, the movie tells us, that they use the abbreviation NDE).

The first person we meet is Dale Black, a former airline pilot, who describes a trip he took in a small plane with two other pilots in 1969 — and how, when the plane crashed into a pavilion, he found himself floating about the scene, looking down at three bodies, his two dead colleagues and himself. 

Gray and Radtke present several stories like this, usually with re-enactments to illustrate the moments for which there is no footage. A car is hit by a semi on a narrow bridge. A kayaker shoots the rapids and ends up under a waterfall. A man suffers from a perforated duodenum in Paris, and the hospital can’t find a doctor to perform the emergency surgery. And so on.

Three other interview subjects also speak a lot during the film. One is Raymond Moody, a psychiatrist who has compiled stories of people describing their near-death experiences. Another is John Burke, an author and a pastor, who has written a list of the common traits of near-death experiences. And the third, Michael Sabom, is a retired cardiologist who has interviewed hundreds of people who have had near-death experiences.

Sabom is the most fascinating voice here, because he’s as close to being a skeptic as the movie finds. Sabom presents himself as someone trying to apply scientific rigor to the idea that people approach the brink of death and come back — and frequently report that they saw their own bodies, and the frantic medical personnel trying to save them. When they are resuscitated, some of the interview subjects say, they recount details of the doctors and nurses that an unconscious person would not have seen. (Cue the “Twilight Zone” music.)

But the point of “After Death” isn’t scientific proof, which is why Sabom is a no-show for most of the movie’s second half. It’s here that the stories get into dark tunnels, a bright light, meetings with departed relatives and, right up to the end, the figure of God. In this movie, it’s always a Christian god. If Buddhists or Muslims or other faiths have near-death experiences, they apparently weren’t sought out for this movie.

“After Death” is being released by Angel Studios, the Provo-based distributor known for two recent successes. One is the TV series “The Chosen,” which depicts the life of Jesus in episodic form. The other is “Sound of Freedom,” the drama in which Jim Caviezel plays Tim Ballard, recounting his efforts to catch child traffickers — a highly fictionalized telling, and one that apparently gets more and more fictional as more revelations and indictments come out about its subject (who has denied all allegations).

As with “Sound of Freedom,” “After Death” ends with a to-the-camera appeal — this time by Gray — to audience members to “play it forward” by purchasing theater tickets for the next person seeking out the movie. And, as before, a helpful QR code is projected onto the screen to direct people to buy those tickets.

Ultimately, “After Death” isn’t for skeptics, but for the believers. It’s meant to comfort people who think there is a heaven, not try to sway the undecided. It’s very certain of what happens when we die — and such certainty isn’t just presumptuous, it’s not particularly interesting as a movie.

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‘After Death’

★★

Opens Friday, October 27, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements including violent descriptions, some bloody images and drug references. Running time: 108 minutes.

Review: 'Killers of the Flower Moon,' a tragic saga of greed and death in Osage territory, might be Martin Scorsese's last epic masterpiece

There are several good reasons why Martin Scorsese’s latest masterpiece, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” is nearly three-and-a-half hours long — but the most compelling one is that Scorsese, who at 80 could very well be making his last great film, is making so many films at once.

This true story — of Oklahoma’s Osage Indians becoming wealthy from oil and becoming the targets of the white population’s murderous greed — is, all at once, a Western, a crime drama, a horror movie, a courtroom drama (in the final hour) and a historical tragedy about the insidious power of American corruption. And it’s a movie that benefits from the breathing space that long running time allows. (If you don’t think you can sit still that long in the theater, wait until it debuts on Apple TV+, and your pause button can provide your own personal intermission.)

It’s the 1920s, and the older Osage can see their way of life is dying out on the Oklahoma land to which the white-ruled government has put them after running them out of Missouri, Arkansas and Kansas. They even perform a ceremony, burying a pipe as a symbol of the old traditions. On the spot of that burial comes a gusher of oil.

Soon, we’re told, the Osage become the richest people, per capita, in the world — and, to cite one example of their ostentatious wealth, the biggest buyers of Pierce-Arrow automobiles in the country. With that wealth come hordes of white men offering to work for the Osage, or angling for ways to cheat them out of their money. Because the whites also control the banks, the Osage are forced to have white guardianship to spend their own money.

One such guardian is a cattle baron, William “King” Hale, played by Robert De Niro. Hale speaks the Osage language, offers support to the tribe’s leaders, and spends his money freely to help those Osage who are burying their loved ones. Turns out there’s a lot of burials these days — many from the so-called “wasting disease,” and others from incidents that the sheriff (who’s white) declines to investigate. Frequently, when these Osage people die, the rights to their oil fortunes often fall to white relatives, some of them also relatives of Hale.

When Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives in Fairfax, Oklahoma, he’s a former cook in a U.S. Army unit fighting in the Great War, who for health reasons can’t perform manual labor. He’s also a nephew of Hale, who sets him up as a driver-for-hire — and one of the first clients he drives is Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), the oldest of four daughters of a wealthy Osage woman, Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal). Hale suggests that Ernest might make a good husband for Mollie, though the audience soon learns to be suspicious of Hale’s motives for matchmaking.

Ernest — as depicted in the script by Eric Roth and Scorsese, based on the book by David Grann (whose fact-based writing became the basis for “The Lost City of Z” and “The Old Man and the Gun”) — is ambitious enough to want money, but not quite smart enough to see the ways Hale is manipulating him into escalating levels of evil behavior. Even as Mollie becomes ill with diabetes, and the injections he administers of a hard-to-find wonder drug (insulin) seem to be making her worse rather than better, Ernest continues to follow Hale’s counsel.

It’s only about two hours into the movie that there’s a possible challenge to Hale’s status quo. That’s when Tom White (Jesse Plemons) — a federal lawman from some new agency he calls “the Bureau of Investigation” (the letters FBI aren’t familiar yet) — comes to Fairfax, looking into the deaths of several Osage, including Mollie’s sisters.

This is the 10th feature film in which Scorsese has directed De Niro — going back 50 years to “Mean Streets,” and including such classics as “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “GoodFellas,” “Cape Fear” and “The Irishman.” So it’s not surprising that the collaboration is again a fruitful one, since Scorsese knows how to deploy De Niro’s coiled menace, and De Niro is comfortable enough to let the movie come to him. 

It’s also the sixth time Scorsese has directed DiCaprio, the most recent being “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and that pairing also has its dividends. DiCaprio doesn’t humanize Ernest’s rough, thuggish behavior, but he does show the pain as his conscience slowly awakens to the misery he and Hale have caused, all to acquire more money.

The melancholy heart of “Killers of the Flower Moon” is Gladstone. The actress (who shined in Kelly Reichert’s “Certain Women”) is introduced as a quiet presence, though her smile and indulgent laugh at Ernest’s crude attempts at charm show a wisdom and passion below the surface. Even as Mollie is relegated to bed by illness and gaslighting, Gladstone’s performance captures the pain and resilience Mollie must maintain to survive the white interlopers’ greed.

There’s a deep bench of supporting players, including some in the last hour who are quite recognizable. It’s fascinating that some of the most interesting small roles are filled by musicians — including Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Pete Yorn, Jack White and the blues legend Charlie Musselwhite — who feel just as authentic as some of the craggy character actors Scorsese has assembled.

Speaking of music, the score is a wonder, a deceptively spare and elegiac work by Scorsese’s old friend and collaborator Robbie Robertson (who died in August) that feels both modern and authentic to the 1920s setting. It’s also worth mentioning two other longtime collaborators doing stellar work here: Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (who’s worked with Scorsese since “The Wolf of Wall Street”) and editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who goes back with Scorsese all the way back to “Raging Bull”).

The sadness that permeates “Killers of the Flower Moon” — the grief over the deaths of so many people for greed, and the sense that a culture was dying with them — is matched by the realization that comes to a movie lover after it’s over. Scorsese and De Niro are both 80 years old, and it’s an uncomfortable truth that neither of them likely has many more movies this good left in the tank. Thankfully, they have given us this one, and it’s something to treasure.

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‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

★★★★

Opens Friday, October 20, in theaters everywhere; will start streaming on Apple TV+ at an undisclosed date. Rated R for violence, some grisly images, and language. Running time: 206 minutes.