Critic Reviews

Those familiar with McDonagh’s work will be unsurprised to learn that Three Billboards is a bold and showboating affair, robustly drawn and richly written; a violent carnival of small-town American life. Yet it has a big, beating heart, even a rough-edged compassion for its brawling inhabitants.

It all makes for soaringly satisfying viewing, yet the satisfaction comes from blistering performances and virtuosic screenwriting, and absolutely nothing else.

McDonagh’s latest work is simply exceptional; a film so rich with narrative fluidity, profane laughs, standout performances and complex character studies that its tremendous emotional hits–often arriving when you least expect them–might just leave you agog.

It is a movie about how anger consumes and destroys, and how the only cure for that anger is empathy, something that’s in short supply these days but Three Billboards has in abundance.

Anger is an energy in Martin McDonagh’s brilliant Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, one of the best films of the year.

Writer/director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges) crafts an expertly structured, brutal, yet surprisingly rousing narrative around a woman who’s ready to torch her entire life if it means catching a killer.

It's a renegade masterpiece that will get you good.

The movie represents a leap forward for writer-director Martin McDonagh. Three Billboards is as clever and imaginative as McDonagh’s “In Bruges,” in terms of how it makes characters collide in delightful and unexpected ways.

It’s one of the best pictures of the year.

Following the path of “Three Billboards” is a little like driving down an unfamiliar road in beautiful but forbidding country late at night, and alternately marveling at the scenery and gripping the steering wheel tightly when yet another steep drop or sudden change of direction presents itself.