'THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI'........THE FEEL-BAD MOVIE OF THE YEAR....

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing,Missouri (2017)   Critics and audiences latched on to  the occasional eruptions of humanity in this movie as they'd been thrown life preservers while bobbing up and down in a turbulent ocean.....

              Understandable......since most of the film is an unforgiving, cruel display of rage, pain and violence, sometimes spiced up with the darkest humor.....

              Writer-director Martin McDonagh's Oscar-bait movie seems to hop, skip and jump through all the usual clever tropes already given a thorough workout in Tarantino and Coen brothers films.......the twisted, dysfunctional characters, the explosive bursts of violence designed to make you cringe and snicker at the same time.

              But unlike Tarantino and the Coens, McDonagh's    purpose and mission is not to dazzle you with his technique. His characters and the actors who bring them to life are the real showstoppers here......not any nonstop rat-a-tat dialogue or swooping camerawork.

              While the film offers vivid supporting roles for Woody Harrelson, Abbie Cornish and Peter Dinklage,  it ultimately comes down to a spectacular master class in acting from Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell.

              We'll just simply state, without going through plot descriptions (which you can easily read in 3,000 other reviews)......the high-wire-without-a-net performances by McDormand and Rockwell virtually guarantee them Academy Awards.  And we realize you didn't hear that here first.......

              The movie overall.........well, we admire its determination to avoid any crowd-pleasing. Like its characters, it swings wildly in unexpected directions. Filled to the brim with both repressed and fully expressed anger, it's mostly an ugly, unpleasant, uncomfortable thing to watch......

              But damned if you'll be able to look away.

               You might feel slightly better at the end of it than you did at the beginning. But not much. And in that regard, it generated for us a fond remembrance of all the cutting edge, uncompromising little dramas that new young directors put out in the 1970's.

               Except that this film now includes all the unleashed nastiness, cruelty and division that marks our current uncivil, graceless era.  This is a movie ruled by characters driven to the brink by the boiling wrath within them.......and forced to deal with consequences.

                4 stars (****)......with or without any accumulated awards, "Three Billboards"  has the power to hurt and haunt anyone who encounters it. For the BQ, that's some great filmmaking.