Martin McDonagh’s new film puts prickly in the pastoral glazing its country charm with absolute acid every chance it gets. Part stern crime drama and part small-town chicanery, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri displays the next level of McDonagh’s talent and potential. Always the sharp storyteller since his roots on the Irish stage, McDonagh’s writing prowess elevates a premise that would fall flat as pure farce in other hands
Read MoreJoe Swanberg is a leader of the "mumblecore" movement, which primarily employs naturalistic everyday settings with improvisational dialogue and a loose story structure. Such an approach has been found to be a double-edged sword of open-endedness. Either it's fresh and interesting enough to keep you guessing or it's maddeningly lost and too unstructured for not really coming to a conclusion or making a point. This film adds another miss to the list for Swanberg. This writer loves what he stands for, but hates the underwhelming results.
Read MoreIt is of great surprise that, for me, all I kept thinking about during "The Drop" was Michael Madsen's response-begging question from Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" as Mr. Blonde: "Are you going to bark all day or are you going to bite?" For too much of "The Drop," a seemingly record number of bushes are being beaten around. Don't get me wrong. A dialogue-driven and slow-boiling premise can work and has worked, worlds over, but it has to deliver at some point. "The Drop" does have a sly ending in mind and at play, but it doesn't match or make up for the tedious lead-up. Considering the talent involved, I expected more.
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