Film

Seven Psychopaths

Name: Seven Psychopaths
Genre: Comedy, Crime
Released: 2012
Cast: Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Christopher Walken, Olga Kurylenko

Martin McDonagh's follow-up to In Bruges is a shaggy, self-interrupting crime comedy about a blocked screenwriter whose friends' dognapping scheme collides with actual gangsters. Characters argue mid-scene about how violent stories should end while the film keeps proving their theories wrong. It's talky, blood-soaked, oddly tender in places, and built for people who like their genre entertainment thinking out loud about itself.

TMDb rating

6.8

If you liked this

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McDonagh's directorial debut has the same acid wit and sudden lurches into real feeling, with Colin Farrell playing guilt-wracked and hilarious at once. If you liked the voice here, this is where it started.

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The template for stylish, nonlinear crime comedy full of philosophical hitmen, absurd violence and dialogue people still quote decades later. Essential viewing for the genre this film is riffing on.

But Its influence is so total that thirty years of imitators, this film included, can make it feel more familiar than fresh.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

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Robert Downey Jr. narrates his own noir parody with wink-at-camera cleverness, mixing a real mystery plot with jokes about how detective stories are supposed to work.

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Burn After Reading2008no page yet

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Snatch2000

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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri2017

McDonagh's later film trades zany psychopaths for grief and rage but keeps the razor dialogue and moral messiness, showing where his instincts went next.

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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri poster

American Movie1999

It's the unscripted mirror of the film's central joke: a struggling writer whose creative nightmare and real life become impossible to separate, minus the gangsters.

This documentary follows a real amateur filmmaker's disaster-strewn quest to finish his own low-budget horror film—funnier, sadder, and stranger than most scripted comedies about creative desperation.

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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs2018no page yet

Structural cousin: interlocking short stories about death and cruelty that keep changing genre and register mid-breath, exactly like the film's own vignettes about its titular psychopaths.

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But Anthology format means some segments land far harder than others, and momentum resets every twenty minutes.