Leonardo DiCpario’s new film Killers of the Flower Moon is being hailed as the best performance of his career.
While the actor has given us some incredible characters in recent years - from wrestling with a bear in The Revenant to playing the debaucherous stockbroker in Wolf of Wall Street - his role as Ernest Burkhart has hit a new frontier for the actor, according to critics.
IndieWire's David Ehlrich said of the actor's performance in Martin Scorsese's movie: “That sepia-toned saga of slow-poisoned self-denial is sustained by the best performance of Leonardo DiCaprio’s entire career.
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“The former matinee idol has never been shy about playing low-lifes and scum-bums, but his nuanced and uncompromising turn as the cretinous Ernest Burkhart mines new wonders from the actor’s long-standing lack of vanity.”
Ester Zuckerman for The Daily Beast said this performance of Dicaprio’s was, without a doubt, one of his best.
His performance also wowed Cannes over the weekend, eliciting a nine-minute standing ovation.
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Killers of the Flower Moon is based on the best-selling non-fiction novel by journalist David Grann and follows the investigation into the countless murders of wealthy Osage people in the 1920s.
The Osage Native Americans became targets of murderers and extortionists after they were awarded legal rights and profited from oil deposits found on their land in Oklahoma.
The story centers around a forgotten chapter in history, where greed triumphed as colonials took out the Osage people one by one.
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The flick stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, who will reunite on screen after DiCaprio’s film debut in This Boy’s Life.
The Guardian deemed it a ‘remarkable epic about the bloody birth of America' while it scored an impressive 97 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.
Oh, this is definitely going to clean up at the Oscars.
DiCaprio admitted to having tweaked the original script and felt the story should focus more on the ‘human aspect’ of one of America's most dark, exploitive chapters.
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Rather than focusing on the investigation of the murders, it needed to focus more on the ‘heart of the Osage’.
“We did a lot of work to try to help Marty do what he does best, which is to tell a very human story,” DiCaprio said, as per Deadline.
He added: “You had this melting pot in Oklahoma where freed slaves had created their own economy, and the Osage emerged as this wealthy culture.
"But you also had during that period the rise of the KKK and white supremacy and this clash of cultures. For some of these white settlers, it was like a gold rush to take advantage of people of color.”
Topics: News, Film and TV, Leonardo DiCaprio, Celebrity