Rupert Pupkin spent much of his (fictional) existence in the shadow of fellow psychopathic Scorsese creation Travis Bickle until The King Of Comedy benefitted from renewed interest in 2019 with the release of Todd Phillips’ Joker. Killers serves as a heartbreaking reminder of a rotten moment in American history - just wait for that final scene - but also Scorsese's extended comment on the violence we turn away from, the people we dehumanise and denigrate. Little does she know he's second in command.

She takes the form of Mollie, portrayed by a mutedly magnetic Lily Gladstone - it's all in her eyes, soft, sad, determined - who watches her family, her community, deteriorate around her at the hands of Hale, Burkhart and his cronies, wondering the entire time if her allegedly loving husband is involved. We're introduced to the Osage through the Coyote eyes of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a bumbling man just back from serving lunch on the World War I frontlines, who conspires with his devious uncle, bespectacled hat-wearer and respected local man William King Hale (Robert De Niro), to marry into Osage land rights and murder his eventual wife for sole ownership. In length, sure - it's three-and-a-half-ours long - but it's also staggering in scope and form, not least if you see it on the big screen, which you absolutely should.

The Age Of Innocence (1993)īased on David Grann's book-length reportage on the slow genocide of the Osage Nation, an Indigenous American tribe, for their oil-rich land at the hands of white settlers, Killers of the Flower Moon is a gargantuan work. Not as well regarded when it came out as Goodfellas, there’s a growing chorus of voices who would now claim Casino is actually the better film. And then there’s the whole “crime might pay but it will destroy your relationships” angle that ran through Goodfellas, but which Scorsese leaned into more heavily here, as De Niro’s mobster, Sam Rothstein, falls for Sharon Stone’s stripper Ginger McKenna while running his Vegas establishment for the Chicago Outfit. Even before The Irishman, Scorsese was expressing an interest in the teamsters union, whose pension fund was embroiled in the real-life casino skimming operation that Casino is based on.

Even before The Departed, it proved that Scorsese’s crime schtick could work when transplanted to a different locale from the Five Boroughs – in this case, Las Vegas.

Roughly the midpoint of Scorsese’s career, Casino is a film that seems to pull its various elements from a number of other Scorsese movies, while foreshadowing others to come.

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