The 90th Academy Awards ceremony is taking place on March 4 and this year nine films have been selected for the much coveted Best Picture category. Among them is "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri", a blackly comic drama about Mildred Hayes, a woman who rents the titular advertising apparatus to provoke the local police into investigating the rape and murder of her teenage daughter.

Written and directed by acclaimed playwright Martin McDonagh, "Three Billboards" is only his third movie following 2008’s "In Bruges" and 2012’s "Seven Psychopaths", even though he has admitted that he prefers writing screenplays to the theater. Until now, his dark and vulgar stories have only ever given him a cult following, and Three Billboards represents his most mainstream appreciation to date.

As with his earlier films, "Three Billboards" takes a standard genre trope and gives it a twist. In this case, its McDonagh’s most ambitious movie as it combines both a police procedural with a revenge movie to produce something unique. This is the aspect which has been singled out by many critics, including Christopher Orr of The Atlantic, who says the film “continually complicates and recomplicates itself, denying viewers the comfort of easy moral footing,” and it does so in terms of both tone and content. “It is by turns heartbreaking, harrowing in its violence, and very, very funny […] It contains both the most moving scene I saw in a theater this year and the most mordant bit of black comedy.”

Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times concurred, with a little poetic license: “Following the path of 'Three Billboards' is a little like driving down an unfamiliar road in beautiful but forbidding country late at night, and alternately marveling at the scenery and gripping the steering wheel tightly when yet another steep drop or sudden change of direction presents itself.”

However, that isn’t to say that the film is totally off the rails, and a large part of that is the quality of the central performances which keep everything anchored. At the heart of the film, and the revenge plotline, is Mildred Hayes as played by Frances McDormand, an actress who has been revered ever since her big screen debut in the Coen Bros., "Blood Simple" back in 1984 and is nominated for her fifth Academy Award – three for Best Supporting Actress and two for Best Actress, including this.

As expected, she has drawn much of the praise for the film. The role of grieving mother angrily looking for vengeance is a tough one to do correctly, especially in a film as knotty as "Three Billboards", without it veering into latter-day Liam Neeson territory and Mick LaSalle of The San Francisco Chronicle says “It’s hard to imagine anyone but McDormand bringing to this role such odd combinations of rage, bitterness, perception, tenderness and probity.” Moira Macdonald of the Seattle Times is similarly astounded by her performance, going as far as to say that she is “[carrying] the film on her blue-denimed shoulders.”

On the other side of the story are the police who appear to alternate between helping, hindering and flat out not caring about Mildred’s daughter. This storyline is mostly taken up by Sam Rockwell, a character actor whose career has managed to cohere, but who has proven himself in movies as varied as "Light Sleeper", "Galaxy Quest", "Moon" and Martin McDonagh’s own "Seven Psychopaths". Jason Dixon, the racist, abusive police officer he portrays, according to Anthony Lane of The New Yorker, takes “his usual persona is […] of the frowning goofball, at once puerile and intense, and [explores] that tricky compound.” The role has also provided Rockwell with his first BAFTA win and Best Supporting Actor nomination.

According to Oddschecker, "Three Billboards" is a favorite in several categories including Best Actress for Frances McDormand and Best Original Screenplay for Martin McDonagh with odds of 1/20 and 13/8 respectively, but it has also moved into being the most likely Best Picture winner following its BAFTA victory with odds of 10/11, taking over from "The Shape of Water".