Duck, you suckers – this darkly comic bonfire of a movie shoots off dangerous sparks that can burn and leave marks. A livewire Frances McDormand will blow you away as Mildred Hayes, a divorced woman who's mad as hell at the police in her town of Ebbing, Missouri. So mad, in fact, that she rents three billboards at $5000 per month to embarrass the local cops who haven't found the killer who raped and incinerated her teen daughter seven months before – since, according to Mildred, cops are "too busy torturing black folks." 
 
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 Sheriff Willoughby (a soulful, exasperated Woody Harrelson) doesn’t like being publicly mocked by billboards that read: "Still No Arrests?" "How Come, Chief Willoughby?" and "Raped While Dying." It's Willoughby’s racist, hot-tempered, pea-brained, momma's-boy deputy Dixon (Sam Rockwell), however, who's practically pissing himself from rage. Rockwell, who makes Dixon horrendous and humane sometimes both in a same breath, is just tremendous – so crazy good and volcanically funny that you want to spontaneously applaud whenever he shows up. 
 
 Explosively written and directed by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh (his first two films were In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths), the film is a launching pad for the combustible force of nature that is McDormand. She batters and cusses her way through the role, digging into McDonagh's ripe, raunchy language like the verbal feast it is. To a hapless TV news reporter who claims the case is closed, Mildred retorts: "This is just getting started – why don't you put that on your Good Morning, fucking Missouri fucking wakeup broadcast, bitch.” (This needs to become a meme ASAP.) 
 
 In a dynamite portrayal to rank with her Oscar-winning Fargo, her Tony-lauded Good People and her Emmy-crowned Olive Kitteridge, McDormand should be adding more gold to her impressive collection. She's phenomenal, though all of the performances are first-rate – including Lucas Hedges as Mildred’s son, John Hawkes as her abusive ex-husband and Peter Dinklage as a local who takes Mildred on a date (God help him). By turns hellaciously hilarious and deeply sorrowful, the film hits you where it hurts, at the nexus of helplessness and fury where a lot of citizens of Trump's America find themselves these days. A blunt-force artist with the soul of a poet, McDonagh is not afraid of adding salt to an open wound; more importantly, he offers no easy answers, outside a hint of forgiveness. Thanks to him and his firebrand star, Three Billboards is more is a no-brainer awards contender – it's a renegade masterpiece that will get you good. 

 But while that is a rage that's exhilarating to witness, it's a rage that's not available to everyone. Just as not everyone in Ebbing can claim the protection of being considering "good," we still don't live in a world where everyone gets to be angry. 

 3 out of 4 stars Title Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Written by Martin McDonagh Directed by Martin McDonagh Starring Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell Genre Drama Classification 14A Country U.K./U.S. Language English Year 2017 
 
 Midway through Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a fawn appears, Bambi-like, in a clearing. The grieving Mildred Hayes, the film's protagonist, almost shakes her head in disbelief: Could this delicate but persistent creature be the spirit of her murdered teenage daughter? No, of course not. "You're pretty, but you ain't her," she tells the little deer, squelching the symbolic apparition just as it materializes. 
 
 Three Billboards is a movie full of such reversals; venturing into the American heartland, the British writer and director Martin McDonagh has created a comic tragedy that ducks and feints, defying expectations with many admirable and some less convincing results. 
 
 Infuriated that local authorities can't find her daughter's rapist and killer, Mildred (Frances McDormand) erects the three billboards of the title. In black letters on a blood-red ground two storeys high, they call out Ebbing police chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) and demand to know why, after seven months, there have been no arrests. 
 
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 This unmediated accusation sets the small community and its police force against Mildred, but Ebbing's hilariously inept coppers are no match for a mother's righteous anger. The decent Willoughby (another finely crafted portrait of sympathetic masculinity from Harrelson) tries to pacify her and rein in the most vicious of his officers, the explosively racist Dixon, played by Sam Rockwell in full psychopath mode. 
 
 McDonagh, however, dispenses with Willoughby halfway through the film – that's perhaps the boldest reversal in his script and its execution is a doozy – but then, rather limply, relies on letters from the police chief to mould the action. 
 
 That action becomes increasingly violent: It is not merely because the protagonist is played by the powerful McDormand, best remembered as the pregnant Marge in Fargo, that the film recalls the heights of the Coen brothers' black comedies. McDonagh, previously recognized for the comic crime drama In Bruges, reaches for that same kind of black and bloody mix where the audience has no choice but to laugh at the savagery. In the finest moment of a delightfully over-the-top performance, Rockwell's Dixon pushes a law-abiding citizen out a window and off a roof. 
 
 Often such scenes make the film viciously funny and pointedly poignant; Three Billboards satirizes police brutality and prejudice to great effect while gradually exposing the danger in Mildred's well-earned but corrosive rage. Occasionally, however, the emotional plausibility in all this mayhem goes missing, as Mildred's violent ex-husband (John Hawkes) attacks her again – in broad daylight with his nice new girlfriend nearby – or as Mildred herself takes her campaign against the police one step too far. And finally, McDonagh's attempts to craft some kind of redemptive U-turn for Dixon fall flat. 
 
 If the film fails to solve Dixon's emotional puzzle, another one that remains troubling is Mildred's relationship with her teenage son, Robbie (Lucas Hedges), the only remnant of her family and link to her motherhood, yet apparently an afterthought in her crazed planning. McDormand can't quite seem to fit Hedges' character into her otherwise viscerally moving performance. Perhaps the trouble is that the confident young Hedges (Manchester by the Sea) is playing too bourgeois a figure for the gritty setting of a film in which McDonagh has not entirely resolved American issues of class and race. 
 
 On shifting ground, it is McDormand's fine performance that holds steady here, her wit and her fury eliciting more admiration than pity for the unrelenting Mildred. McDonagh does not always conquer this heartland, but McDormand already owns it. 

 Because nothing is out of bounds where McDonogh's work is concerned, there are moments, as its characters wrestle with anger and the consequences of anguish, when you may fear we'll be left with no one to side with, but a director this smart has got that covered as well. Just not in the way you have in mind. 

 Published on Mar 23, 2017 
 
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 THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI is a darkly comedic drama from Academy Award® winner Martin McDonagh (IN BRUGES). After months have passed without a culprit in her daughter’s murder case, Mildred Hayes (Academy Award® winner Frances McDormand) makes a bold move, commissioning three signs leading into her town with a controversial message directed at William Willoughby (Academy Award® nominee Woody Harrelson), the town's revered chief of police. When his second-in-command Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell), an immature mother’s boy with a penchant for violence, gets involved, the battle between Mildred and Ebbing's law enforcement is only exacerbated. 
 
 
 
 Written and Directed by: Martin McDonagh 
 
 Produced by: Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin, Martin McDonagh 
 
 Cast: Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Abbie Cornish, Lucas Hedges, Željko Ivanek, Caleb Landry Jones, Clarke Peters, Samara Weaving with John Hawkes and Peter Dinklage 
 
 
 
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 CLOSE Frances McDormand stars as a crusading mom determined to find justice for her daughter in the darkly comic 'Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.' Fox Searchlight 
 
 Frances McDormand stars as a grieving mother who's had enough with police incompetence in the dark comedy "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri." (Photo: Merrick Morton) 
 
 They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but Mildred Hayes would put the fear of God in the devil himself. 
 
 Wielding righteous anger, fiery emotion, biting humor and an ornery manner right out of a Clint Eastwood Western, Frances McDormand unleashes 2017’s most indelible movie mom in the darkly comic crime drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (**** out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, expands to additional cities throughout November, goes nationwide Dec. 1). Writer/director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges) crafts an expertly structured, brutal, yet surprisingly rousing narrative around a woman who’s ready to torch her entire life if it means catching a killer. 
 
 Several months after her teenage daughter is raped and burned to death by an unknown assailant, Mildred has had it with the small-town cops bumbling the case and rents space on three rickety billboards at the murder site that haven’t been used in years. In black letters with a red background and no subtlety whatsoever, the grieving mother calls out the chief of police, Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), as the scapegoat for his officers’ haplessness. 
 
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 The thing is, most of Ebbing isn’t on Mildred’s side, even knowing her loss, since she’s not exactly what you’d call a “people person.” Willoughby’s heart is in the right place and he’s a popular guy, plus he’s got cancer: Their relationship, though frayed, is one of the film's most intriguing on an emotional level. More confrontational is Mildred’s dynamic with Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell), a mama’s boy with a screw loose who’s best known for torturing black prisoners, and her volatile ex-husband (John Hawkes). There are even complicated feelings between Mildred and those closest to her, including her son Robbie (Lucas Hedges) and loyal pal James (Peter Dinklage). 
 
 Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell) and Mildred (Frances McDormand) clash in 'Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.' (Photo: Merrick Morton) 
 
 Mildred’s madder than hell and she’s not taking it anymore, and McDormand infuses her with such pain and presence that, even though she’s not that likable, her wounded mother is a wonderfully primal sight to behold. Everyone from her dentist to the reporters who cover the over-the-top billboards incurs her wrath, and when a priest shows up at her house to urge her to turn the other cheek, Mildred launches a nuclear rebuke comparing the church to the Crips and Bloods. 
 
 Among a standout cast across the board, McDormand's and Rockwell’s performances give Three Billboards most of its emotional weight — and two instant Oscar contenders, especially McDormand, who should follow up her Fargo win two decades later with this showpiece. Both of their characters have exquisite arcs that test their beliefs and each come out the other side changed people. 
 
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 McDonagh has created a powder keg of a town whose biggest problems are rooted in the issues of our times, including racism, gender politics, sexual assault, police violence and simply loving thy neighbor. But it remains a satisfying narrative throughout, blending black humor and menace, and fostering a pervading sense of hope amid a relentless story of revenge. 
 
 CLOSE The weather's getting chilly, and that means it's the perfect time to see what's playing on the silver screen. While these flicks aren't holiday-themed, they're certainly worth watching this season. USA TODAY 
 
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– Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri stars Frances McDormand as a woman who swears a whole lot more than a sailor. She also happens to be grieving over the unsolved murder of her daughter, which prompts her to erect three billboards highlighting what she views as police incompetence. The flick, written and directed by Martin McDonagh, has an impressive 95% rating from 85 critics on Rotten Tomatoes. What they're saying: Kenneth Turan calls Three Billboards an "energetically demented production" with "so many devious turns that it just about whipsaws our expectations." He credits McDonagh for "its verve, its flair and its precision," as well as its "intensely imagined" characters. At the forefront is Mildred Hayes "played with convincing and uncompromising fierceness by McDormand … in what could be the role of her rich and varied career," he writes at the Los Angeles Times. Kate Taylor agrees McDormand is "powerful" in this film that "satirizes police brutality and prejudice to great effect." It "recalls the heights of the Coen brothers' black comedies," as McDonagh "reaches for that same kind of black and bloody mix where the audience has no choice but to laugh at the savagery," she writes at the Globe and Mail, touting Sam Rockwell's "delightfully over-the-top performance" as racist Dixon. One weakness: "emotional plausibility." Get this woman an Oscar, Brian Truitt writes of McDormand, whom he praises as "wielding righteous anger, fiery emotion, biting humor and an ornery manner right out of a Clint Eastwood Western" at USA Today. Perhaps most complimentary is Truitt's take on the film overall. It's timely—touching on "racism, gender politics, sexual assault, police violence"—yet satisfying, "blending black humor and menace, and fostering a pervading sense of hope amid a relentless story of revenge." Put another way, Three Billboards is "a renegade masterpiece that will get you good," writes Peter Travers at Rolling Stone. With not a bad thing to say, Travers calls the film "a no-brainer awards contender." Rockwell is "so crazy good and volcanically funny that you want to spontaneously applaud whenever he shows up." But it's McDormand who "should be adding more gold to her impressive collection." She "will blow you away."