Black, fluffy, and gloriously unilateral, Colin Farrell's eyebrows aren't the prettiest features of In Bruges. That honor falls to the Belgian city itself, known for its scenic medieval turrets, bourgeois tedium, and unfavorable comparisons with Amsterdam. Farrell's shaggy brow is easily the most entertaining thing in Irish playwright Martin McDonagh's charming but slight first foray into the crime caper. Flying about the actor's face like unhinged windshield wipers or knitting together in bovine puzzlement, lust, or sorrow for past sins, this hyperactive hair tells you all you need to know about Ray, a dimly bulbed minor hit man forcibly furloughed in Bruges with staid older colleague Ken (Brendan Gleeson) by their boss, played with evil relish by Ralph Fiennes. While Ken pores over guidebooks, Ray pursues a Dutch nymph (Clémence Poésy) entrusted with furthering the movie's surrealist ambitions by supplying hard drugs on the film set that Ray and Ken keep mysteriously running into — the kind of film set that features angry dwarfs, fog machines and copious allusions to the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. Fellini ahoy! Expletive-heavy monologues, father-son bonding, and gunplay ensue, but there's something glib and derivative about the clever chatter, and all the proletarian poetry in the world can't save this movie from its blurry mess of mixed motives and callow pretensions to moral inquiry.

Review by Ella Taylor