You never bet against Marty, but even he knows when he needs some extra advisement. Killers of the Flower Moon, the latest epic from the legendary director, has received a rapturous reception from its premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, including an outpour of ecstatic reviews on Letterboxd. 

Chronicling the horrific murders of Osage Nation people in the 1920s, those praising Flower Moon have noted the decision to place narrative perspective on the marriage of Mollie and Ernest Burkhart (Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio, both outstanding), using this relationship to interrogate both the collective and personal levels on which these crimes were felt.

At the press conference the day after the film’s premiere, Chief Standing Bear, leader of the Osage Nation, described how that focus was vital to Scorsese’s telling of the story. “I asked Mr. Scorsese, how are you going to approach the story? He said, ‘I’m going to tell a story about trust,’” the Chief told the attendees. “‘Trust between Molly and Ernest, trust between the outside world and the Osage and a betrayal of those trusts, deep betrayal.’

“My people suffered greatly, and to this very day, those effects are with us. But I can say on behalf of the Osage, Martin Scorsese and his team have restored trust, and we know that trust will not be betrayed.”

Meanwhile, on the first Friday of the fest, Cate Blanchett and director Warwick Thornton (who is a Kaytetye man raised in Mparntwe, also known as Alice Springs) presented The New Boy, starring Blanchett as a nun whose faith is rocked when a nine-year-old Aboriginal boy is delivered to the remote monastery she runs. An exploration of how imported colonial faith eroded Indigenous spirituality, Thornton explained to Letterboxd the Australian cinematic language in which his film is situated.

“We make a lot of films about the fear of the landscape, colonizing the landscape,” he said. “Cinema about the space between where the English green grass that we have planted in Australia to feel like we’re in England ends and the bush starts—that transition, that veranda between two worlds… which is a great place to have conversations.” 

As Issy notes in their Letterboxd review out of Cannes, The New Boy is an “unflinching gaze back at what Australian cinema has already created,” asking, “what would this be from an Aboriginal perspective?”

Cannes is also a film market, and that’s where the first images from Ka Whawhai Tonu were released as it opened for sales. Translated as “We Will Fight On”, Ka Whawhai Tonu is an action adventure drama set during the first New Zealand land wars in 1864. Written by Tim Worrall (Tūhoe) and directed by Mike Jonathan (Ngāti Maniapoto), Ka Whawhai Tonu stars Cliff Curtis and Temuera Morrison among others, and will no doubt premiere in the fall festival season. (It opens in New Zealand in 2024.) 

Read more about how the Osage Nation shaped Killers of the Flower Moon in Brian Formo’s report from Scorsese’s CinemaCon conversation with Leonardo DiCaprio. And for a deep dive into the past and present of Native cinema, Letterboxd’s Indigenous editor Leo Koziol takes us into films made in the 20th century and in the 21st.