I think this is very much an example of what cinema was made for. Three Billboards is excellent.

Rating: 10/10 (14 February 2020)

It's a film much like the, often focused on, tied back undercut of Frances McDormand's hair; it very much presents two diametrically opposed things at once, one on top, one underneath and it lets us feel the way we want about them. Frances' Mildred may very well have been crazy before her daughter was killed, we don't know as we're mercifully and brilliantly dropped in months into her grieving process. People don't generally write slice of life films like this unless they're true stories, which intensifies the proof of skill writer/director Martin McDonagh has with writing nuanced, balanced, flawed characters. He manages, from his background writing plays, to not waste a single scene, there is not one moment in this film that doesn't bleed into another at some point and every moment gives weight to the next in the kind of suspense, surprise and momentum that other films just dream of having. The film uses its small microcosm of Ebbing, Missouri, and it's small incomplete story, to subvert film cliches effortlessly. There's a moment where Woody Harrelson coughs blood in the middle of a tough interrogation scene and the artificiality of his demeanour and that moment is just killed dead; his face shocked like a little boy's, his subject actually instantly taking pity on him. I've seen this in real life, I've never seen a moment like this in film, a construct built on artificiality, to use that construct to break it, just to show how human these human-like artifices are, is as close to magic as cinema gets. What am I talking about? I mean, I know, do you? And if you do, can you explain it to the next guy, cos I can't.