TRAVIS BYRAM'S MOVIE REVIEWS

Despite its seemingly straightforward title, Martin McDonagh's new masterpiece doesn't take place in Ebbing, Missouri. It takes place in a slightly alternative world, where everybody is just slightly meaner to one another, slightly more profane in their vocabulary, but is simultaneously slightly smarter than any dialogue you're likely to hear in a movie this year. I call it "McDonaghland," and you should buy your tickets for admission ASAP, because Three Billboards is so far my favorite movie of the year. It may not reach the heights of McDonagh's directorial debut, In Bruges , which I still hold as one of the finest scripts ever produced, but boy does Three Billboards soar. It has the simplest of premises: Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), unsatisfied with the police investigation of the rape and death of her daughter, buys three billboards worth of space to call out the Ebbing police force, singling out Chief William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) by name. ...

In the eighth grade I, to no one's surprise who knows me now, was involved in a book club at my middle school, where you could take your lunch to the library (I can't even do that in college!) and discuss newly released books or popular books coming out; you didn't even have to read a book a week. It wasn't a club, it was an excuse for outcasts to get out of the cafeteria. But a memory that rests so vividly in my mind is hearing about "The Hunger Games" for the first time. It was in 2009, "Catching Fire" was set to come out in the proceeding weeks, and in anticipation of that they described the premise of "THG": in a dystopian world (isn't that always how books we read in middle school started?) a girl takes her sister's place to take part in a deadly series of "games" her corrupt government has set up to keep the 99% in their place. Honestly I thought it sounded ridiculous. Then my freshman year in high school I gave it ...

Let me confess my full love of and practice of magic before I continue this review. Magic, well for me mostly card tricks, was a huge part of my life in fifth grade. I got my friends and I to pull them off, amazing (or at least slightly surprising) my peers and adults who were patient enough to tolerate as I carefully balanced where their card was going to be. I even performed a card trick (with a deck of Power Ranger cards, no less) for my sixth grade talent day. Of course, as seventh grade hit, puberty pulled off the evilest trick on me: making my love of card tricks disappear. So I've always been enamored with magic, especially the act Penn & Teller, who aren't afraid to show you how some of their tricks are performed. Unlike Penn & Teller, or me at my sixth grade performance, "Now You See Me" doesn't blow you away with the big reveal. It leaves you confused and mad you sat down for such a long...trick. The Hollywood dazzle, and product placements (...