The most important scene in Killers of the Flower Moon is also its most formally audacious. After presenting more than three hours of criminal, despicable abuse of Indigenous Americans, drawn from the aghast reporting in David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name, director Martin Scorsese orchestrates a coda that casts aside a more conventional summation of the various characters’ post-narrative fates. Instead of a couple of onscreen paragraphs that somberly detail outcomes beyond the final dramatic scene, Scorsese conveys the same sort of information through the staging of a true crime radio drama, with the filmmaker himself portraying the program’s main narrator. It is a rueful condemnation of transmogrifying atrocity into entertainment, or essentially what the film has just done. Overtly through his art, Scorsese seems to acknowledge the slippery morals of his own instincts. Across his long career, Scorsese’s fascination with immorality combined with his nearly unparalleled talent for visual storytelling to make monsters into gripping, compelling figures. Much as Scorsese clearly wants to shift the focus of Killers of the Flower Moon to the Osage Nation people who were terrorized, famously revamping the script considerably when COVID-driven delays afforded the opportunity to do so, his natural gravitational pull keeps bringing him back to the hopelessly corrupt — the Oklahoma gangsters — who cause grievous harm. As usual, Scorsese is the guide to and beneficiary of tremendous work from collaborators, primarily that of cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, actors Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone, and musician Robbie Robertson, but Killers of the Flower Moon is vital because of the way it illuminates and complicates the director’s lifelong reckoning with the savage sordidness of human nature.