TIFF Critic’s Notebook 3: Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri and The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Martin McDonagh and his brother John Michael started making movies about the same time; I’m inclined to give the latter the edge for The Guard, the most uncomplicatedly funny and successful of the films they’ve both made. They’re very much brothers with a shared sensibility grown more matched over the years living together as adults, writing their separate work while watching the same movies movies: a gift for idiomatically spry humor, often in the insult-directed vein, balancing out an attendant tendency to go heavy on Catholic guilt and a fairly simplistic form of moral “complication.” Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri sets […]