Just To Be Clear

My Cannes Killers of the Flower Moon review, tapped out on my iPhone 12 outside an old-town eatery, amounted to a B or a B-minus.

What I wrote between bites of pizza and salad under a damp awning wasn’t a pan. I don’t regard Killers as a weak or poorly crafted film (from a technical standpoint) at all. It’s not. I regard it as a solemn, diligent, semi-haunting, very well made film that “doesn’t quite get there.”

Repeating: Flower Moon isn’t a bad film or a failure. It’s somewhere between a B and B-minus. But it never really tags one. Albert Pujols‘ bat never really goes crack. You know that feeling when a film is moving along at a steady professional clip and then the big crescendo is supposed to happen but it just kind of trickles off? A film that rumbles along in a steady, workmanlike and then cruises to the finish line without setting off fireworks? That’s Flower Moon.