Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

McDonagh takes the audience's loyalty and swings it around, taking you on an emotionally volatile, but fascinating, drive-by in rural America.

...tragic, comic, violent, tender and heartbreaking.

Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri unfolds as a typical revenge vigilantly ploy, and could have stayed so under normal direction and screenwriting. Instead, it gets turned into one of the best pictures of the year.

Sound too bleak? For some, perhaps. But in McDonagh's careful hands, it's a Cirque du Soleil-like tightrope walk, gracefully balancing the harrowing with the humorous.

The result suggests a greeting card spattered with gore. Beneath the little flecks of brain and bone, the Hallmark logo is unmistakable.

While McDonagh's dialogue is ripe and chewy, McDormand has the power to speak volumes in silence.

If Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri carries a lesson or otherwise some underlying thought, then it must be that the abusers of power are struck and wounded, too, and that forgiveness and understanding offer a difficult, if imperfect, salve.

don't read any spoilers, don't think about the plot, don't even watch the trailer if you can: just get yourself a ticket and go see this film. I guarantee it will be one of the best movies you will see this year.

When the pressures of guilt and honesty are applied to its many characters, their truer traits and flaws come to the surface like rain drawing out new blooms of promise or the nightcrawler worms of hidden ugliness.

The film is just fine, but there’s only so far I can go with this kind of screenwriting.