Martin McDonagh
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“What Kind of Pain is This Coming From?”: Martin McDonagh on Creating the Award-Winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
If the road to the Oscars is paved with festival accolades, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is already well on its way to victory. Opening this week, playwright Martin McDonagh’s third feature has already picked up two major prizes: the Best Screenplay award in Venice as well as People’s Choice Award in Toronto, the festival’s top prize. The actors masterfully balance humor with despair throughout the film. In what has been called her best role since Fargo, Frances McDormand plays a grieving mother who decides to take matters into her own hands after local police have failed to track down […]
by Ariston Anderson on Nov 11, 2017 -
TIFF Critic’s Notebook 3: Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri and The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Martin McDonagh and his brother John Michael started making movies about the same time; for The Guard, the most uncomplicatedly funny and successful of the films they’ve both made, I’m inclined to give the latter the edge. They’re very much brothers with a shared sensibility grown more matched over years spent living together as adults, while they wrote their separate work and watched the same movies: a gift for idiomatically spry humor, often in the insult-directed vein, balancing out an attendant tendency to go heavy on Catholic guilt and a fairly simplistic form of moral “complication.” Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2017 -
TRAILER WATCH: MARTIN MCDONAGH’S “SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS”
Though I must admit his theater work is a total blind spot for me, I’m a huge fan of what Martin McDonagh does as a writer/director in film. I loved the wildly funny Six Shooter, the violent and subversive short that won McDonagh an Academy Award, and his debut feature, In Bruges, was a darkly comic addition to the hit man movie subgenre that showed he could work skilfully on a larger cinematic canvas. For his new film, Seven Psychopaths, McDonagh seems to be ratcheting up the silliness factor — although I’m sure there’s some very black moments in the movie that […]
by Nick Dawson on Aug 14, 2012 -
John Michael McDonagh, The Guard
You’ve seen it all before. Amidst a sea of police corruption, one last honest, wisecracking cop and an improbable sidekick unravel a series of criminal entanglements.They’re an unlikely pair and one of them is surely way out of his natural element. There will be chases, usually with cars, although likely on foot too, and gunplay, half quotable one-liners, and maybe a dash of suspense, although it’s highly unlikely either of our leads will meet an untimely demise. How could anyone possible make a tired scenario like this fresh? Just ask John Michael McDonagh, brother of Martin, the lauded Irish playwright […]
by Brandon Harris on Jul 27, 2011
