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, 2017Martin 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