It’s not unusual for a movie with positive buzz coming off the festival circuit to fall prey to a backlash cycle (as with La La Land) or to other, more serious matters (as with The Birth of a Nation). Three Billboards got something very right about women’s rage, but it also got something very wrong about race - no small matter for a film set in Missouri in 2017 that features an openly racist cop who dances around the n-word and has tortured a black man in police custody. Michael Tran/Getty Imagesīut when the movie started screening outside the festival circuit weeks later, what had looked like consensus between both audiences and critics began to crumble. Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell at the premiere of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2017. The audience picked Three Billboards over crowd-pleasing movies like The Shape of Water, Darkest Hour, and Molly’s Game. (I saw it in Toronto, and though I didn’t love the film as much as some of my colleagues, I appreciated what it was going for.) But it wasn’t just many critics who loved the movie: The ticket-buying audience at the public screenings in Toronto also voted to award the film the People’s Choice Award, historically a solid indicator of future awards-season success. The film raked in accolades from critics at its festival premiere in Venice and more in Toronto the next week. And it was clear from the trailer that Three Billboards was a movie about a woman fed up with the world’s injustice in general and her own town’s specifically McDonagh had been working on the screenplay for years, but its arrival seemed perfectly timed for the end of 2017.
It boasts a bevy of strong performances led by Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, and Woody Harrelson, and a barnburning screenplay by McDonagh - all of whom are among the film’s seven Oscar nominations, which also include Best Picture. Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri seemed poised from the start to be an awards-season steamroller.
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