McDonagh takes the audience's loyalty and swings it around, taking you on an emotionally volatile, but fascinating, drive-by in rural America.

...tragic, comic, violent, tender and heartbreaking.

Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri unfolds as a typical revenge vigilantly ploy, and could have stayed so under normal direction and screenwriting. Instead, it gets turned into one of the best pictures of the year.

If Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri carries a lesson or otherwise some underlying thought, then it must be that the abusers of power are struck and wounded, too, and that forgiveness and understanding offer a difficult, if imperfect, salve.