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Top Critics (36)
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It plays really engagingly, with the leads doing a wonderful Mutt and Jeff act and the camera lingering lovingly over scenery that looks awfully pretty in the moments before it gets spattered with blood.
For all his movie's tough talk, it's a sometimes slipshod construction.
This dark comedy shifts effortlessly between silly and sobering, and it finally gives Colin Farrell the chance to be as funny as we've long suspected he could be.
It's hard to mix dark wit with real tragedy, but that's what writer-director Martin McDonagh pulls off with In Bruges, a wonderfully realized examination of unintended and deadly consequences.
'After I killed him, I dropped the gun in the Thames' -- so begins In Bruges, an insanely clever thug's tale so rife with obscenity that those 11 words form one of the longest complete sentences that can be repeated safely here.
In the end, In Bruges is a bit arch and artificial, but it is more than redeemed by Farrell and Gleeson's presence, and by the bushwhacking wit of the film's writer/director.
One of this holiday season's most pleasant dark-horse dramadies.
Moonlighting playwright Martin McDonagh yanks a trapdoor on his gallows humor - jerking from wry cringe comedy to a surreal congregation of blind skinheads, fat Americans and high midgets before a violent, solemn climactic parable about purgatory.
No chit-chat passes by without an ornate bit of would-be profane drollery
In Bruges, with its blunt, black wit running up against its moral fiber, manages to have its violent-crime-comedy cake and transcend it too.
Entre la comedia negra y la tragedia sangrienta, una película inusual y con ciertos rasgos de originalidad no apta para todos los estómagos o sensibilidades.
An intriguing mix of situational humor and existential dread, a balancing act of light and dark, memorably executed.
One of the most original films in years.
Maybe it's just that the cycle of hitman film escapades is played out for the time being, but In Bruges might have been better off using a silencer.
This is funny and touching; subtle whilst incredulous, any which way -- it's clever, endearing and lots of fun.
Playwright Martin McDonagh's debut feature of his own script shows still-tentative cinematic skills, yet his flair for dialogue and inanity delivers the laughs as the bodies hit the cobblestones.
In Bruges is funny and flashy, but as it ends you know you've been laughing because it truly hurts, and every flare and flash of the talking and the killing have left something much more subtle burned into your brain.
McDonagh's trademark is dark humor, the ability to humanize inhuman situations, and plot twists you don't see coming. Expect all of these here, along with gorgeous cinematography by Eigil Bryld.
The first film to earn a place on my 2008 10-best list, In Bruges is a laughing skull of a movie.
If you enjoyed last year's underappreicated You Kill Me, book yourself a return ticket to Bruges.
McDonagh directs with supreme confidence, just as he writes.
McDonagh's dialogue is often bruisingly funny -- particularly once hambone Ralph Fiennes makes his belated entrance -- and his sense of the absurd never falters.
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