“Some films have a heat that makes you shrink from the cinema screen,” begins the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, “After this morning’s screening of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, I had to check my eyebrows were still intact. The British-Irish director Martin McDonagh set the Venice Film Festival ablaze with this gut-twisting, cinder-black comedy about communal guilt and individual forgiveness, which roars off down some extraordinarily brassy narrative gambits, diesel fumes wafting in its wake, and with the ambient bombast cranked up through the roof. It surpasses McDonagh’s sensational debut In Bruges, and more than makes amends for Seven Psychopaths, its overthought, overwrought follow-up.”
The Guardian’s Xan Brooks seems singed as well, noting that McDonagh “tosses [Three Billboards] into competition, underarm, like a firecracker, where it promptly explodes in a flash of jokes, a splash of blood and a twisting plume of ornate dialogue. It remains to be seen how this one will bed down; how deep an impression it leaves once the smell of cordite has faded. But in the moment, good heavens, this feels like Bonfire night and the Fourth of July.”
For David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter, “this is a corrosively humorous drama of festering injustice, Shakespearean rage, grave reckoning and imperfect redemption, which unfolds with the epic dimensions of a classic Western showdown. . . . It's been months since Mildred [Frances McDormand] heard a word from cops about the investigation of her teenage daughter's horrific rape and murder by incineration, so she takes radical steps to light a flame under the ass of local law enforcement. Following a rudimentary check of the legal restrictions on billboard advertising, she has three signs put up, their blunt messages in boldface uppercase on a blood-red background reading, in order: Raped While Dying; And Still No Arrests; How Come, Chief Willoughby?”
“When she accuses Willoughby of being ‘too busy torturing black folks’ to solve her daughter’s murder, there’s an unmistakable echo of the case of the recently pardoned Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who in his anti-immigrant crackdown fever ran an office that failed to investigate hundreds of sex crimes against children,” writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman. “Yet the black-and-white moral lines quickly bleed into shades of gray. . . . Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri isn’t a righteous demagogic attack on the complacency of the police, or on masculine violence and privilege—though it is a meditation on those things. It’s not a whodunit with a clear villain and a connect-the-dots suspense plot that will lead to his capture—though it plays off our desire for all that.”
For Screen’s Fionnuala Halligan, though, this is the “film with the best title and trailer of the year, but which fails to fully deliver on the promise of either. . . . Anchored by a funny, foul-mouthed performance from McDormand, McDonagh’s daringly-structured dark comedy is rich and layered and often laugh-out-loud funny but trips over constant tonal shifts. . . . A strong cast which also includes Sam Rockwell, Peter Dinklage, Lucas Hedges and Caleb Landry Jones pulls hard together, straining for the piece to cohere, although Australian actress Abbie Cornish is palpably ill at ease.”
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“While McDonagh’s screenplay is ingenious, and McDormand its pole star, Rockwell has a major transformation to pull off and he does so brilliantly, negotiating the tricksy turns and shifts of tone McDonagh fashions,” notes Gregory Ellwood at the Playlist. “If you want to say it’s Rockwell’s best performance to date we certainly won’t stop you.”
“Harrelson also deserves mention for a humane and strangely moving performance,” adds John Bleasdale at CineVue. “In the end, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a multi-layered piece with such swathes of great dialogue that it will no doubt reward—if not demand—multiple viewings.”
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