For the last two years in a row, one of the major premieres at the Cannes Film Festival has been a mainstream film that works with the trappings and tropes of the Western genre. But there’s not much connection between Martin Scorsese’s Oklahoma-set 1920s period piece “Killers of the Flower Moon,” one of the hits of last year’s festival, and Kevin Costner’s “Horizon: An American Saga,” which had its premiere at the Grand Theatre Lumiere on Sunday evening.
For Scorsese, approaching that location and time period meant thinking hard about what he could bring to a genre that he felt had peaked with directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks in the 1940s and ’50s, and essentially been ended by Sam Peckinpah’s revisionist Western “The Wild Bunch” in the late 1968s.