Martin McDonagh's latest genre hybrid, the comedy/tragedy/mystery/procedural Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is a mess. As messes go, though, it's one of 2017's most confident and entertaining, and might easily reward repeat viewings more than many other far-better movies.

Last week, in my review of the marvelous family drama Wonder, one of my few gripes concerned the implausible drama-club scenes, and I wrote, “Movies never seem to get school theatre right.” Clearly, bitching occasionally pays off. Because less than a week later, I watched writer/director Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird get school theatre exactly right – which wasn't shocking, in retrospect, considering this coming-of-age comedy appeared to get everything right about damn near everything.

If you saw Wonder over the weekend – and based on the film's unexpectedly massive box office, a bunch of you likely did – you may have seen it alongside a hefty number of elementary- and middle-school students. If so, I hope you experienced this family melodrama the way I did during my sold-old screening: hearing, with immense gratitude, a young crowd cheer and applaud a cineplex entertainment that wasn't a superhero epic, a Disney reboot, a Pixar animation, or anything that involved robots transforming into cars.

For the eighth Cinema at the Figge presentation, series programmers at Ford Photography will screen writer/director Chloé Zhao's Songs My Brothers Taught Me in a November 30 Figge Art Museum event, with the award-winning feature preceded by short films, live music, and complimentary beer samples from WAKE Brewing.