three billboards outside ebbing missouri run time

Stop it again 10 minutes from the end and you won’t be any clearer. Stop the film halfway through and you won’t know where it’s going.

Initially setting itself up as a frontier-justice drama replete with saloons and guns and populated by white hats and black hats, it writhes and bucks and turns inside out. A murdered girl’s defiant mother (McDormand) boldly paints three local signs with a controversial message, igniting a furious battle with a volatile cop (Sam Rockwell) and the town’s revered chief of police (Woody Harrelson).

Three Billboards is a movie in which even the second and third-rung players are gifted fully fleshed characters to inhabit – Caleb Landry Jones, Peter Dinklage and John Hawkes all provide sterling support – and which refuses to tick any screenwriting boxes unless said box is then royally upended. A second golden baldie is surely in the post.Īlso in the running will be Rockwell, who does some of his best work with a character who’s mean-spirited, physically abusive, racist… and so much more, as McDonagh’s sparkling screenplay again veers direction to flip assumptions on their head. “I assume ya can’t say nothing defamatory, and ya can’t say ‘Fuck’? That right?” It’s a powerhouse performance, McDormand’s best since winning an Oscar for 1996’s Fargo. “What’s the law on what ya can and can’t say on a billboard?” she asks. From pioneer stock, she’s no-nonsense to the bone. She is, in fact, a hugely likeable, deeply sympathetic figure who would nonetheless take your understanding and grind it into the mud. But Mildred’s moral centre is unimpeachable.

Three billboards outside ebbing missouri run time