"In Bruges"

Just a few months after his "Daredevil" costar erased almost a decade of cinematic badwill by directing his baby brother in the underrated actor's-feast "Gone, Baby, Gone," here is Colin Farrell starting his very own second act. Few actors have ever ascended to stardom so quickly and flamed out so magnificently and bloated so obnoxiously as Farrell, who wowed Hollywood with "Tigerland," was the guy inside the "Phone Booth," played it like an action star in "SWAT," then became a tabloid mainstay (he snogged Britney!) and an overexposed joke onscreen - showing his wang in "A Home at the End of the World," and being "Alexander." That movie was a cancer for every career it touched - Jared Leto, who decided to focus on his crappy band; Val Kilmer, soon to be the voice of KITT on the new "Knight Rider"; Angelina Jolie, who had a good accent in "A Mighty Heart" then decided to phone in a refurbished "Alexander" Eurotrash-lilt for "Beowulf"; poor Oliver Stone, who's released two director's cuts of the movie in between making an impossibly sappy "World Trade Center"; and poorer Colin Farrell.

He followed "Alexander" with another historical epic, "The New World," which was remarkable, but Farrell had the Richard Gere role, playing more of an archetype of wounded heroism (and sad-eyed romanticism) than a real character - and worse, he had all that anachronistic beer weight, sticking out like a sore thumb among all the starving Virginians.

"Miami Vice" was even worse - an utterly joyless performance in an equally joyless movie, lacking both the fun of the original series and the gravitas it desperately desired. It is the strange calculus of Hollywood's star-making machine that an actor who rose to acclaim for his quirky Irish charm should be so often cast as a stonefaced Yank - who else can lay claim to playing a two soldiers (one World War II, one Vietnam), an FBI agent, John Smith, Jesse James, and Sonny Crockett in six years or less?

Buried right in between "Alexander" and "The New World" was practically the only real acting Farrell did the first half of this decade - in a guest appearance on "Scrubs," playing a rascal Irish laddie, Farrell was fast, loose, roguish, gleefully misguided but not without a moral compass (after he injured a man in a bar fight, he brought him to the hospital).

There's quite a bit of that spirit in his performance in "In Bruges." There's a wonderful moment early in the film where Farrell, playing an Irish hitman trapped in the titular well-preserved Belgian city, tries to convince his older partner (played by Brendan Gleeson, effortlessly) to go to the pub. Ken, the elder, is having none of it - he's here for the culture, not for the beer. Farrell's Ray scrunches against the window, looking like a jilted puppy. A glint enters his eye - you can see it, as Ray smiles and then stops himself from smiling, and looks from side to side as if afraid someone might see the lightbulb over his head. "Let's go see the medieval buildings," he tells Ken. "They probably look much different... at night."

"In Bruges" is a grand kind of movie - intimate, yet with far-reaching interests (Christ's blood makes an appearance; the finale includes an homage to Hieronymus Bosch), with a cast stocked with excellent actors cast perfectly. Gleeson's Ken is the sort of character you rarely see anymore - an old, quiet, infinitely fascinated and fascinating fellow - really, the kind of man for whom the word "fellow" was invented. Also stellar is Clemence Poesy, who makes up for her nearly wordless part in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" with a teasing wit that goes splendidly with her impossible beauty.

This is a British gangster film in the best tradition of "The Long Good Friday" and "Get Carter" - Ralph Fiennes shows up near the end of the film in a blazingly hilarious, horrifically evil performance that recalls Ben Kingsley in "Sexy Beast," with an added dose of good humor and an oddly touching apologetic madness ("I'm sorry I called you an inanimate object," he tells his wife after a fight.) Yet "In Bruges" is also a wonderful portrait of a little-known European city. I have a desperate affection for movies about foreigners abroad in strange cities - "The Third Man" and "Before Sunrise" might be my favorite movies, as much for their dual portraits of Vienna (as a bombed-out underworld and a picturesque lovescape, respectively) as for their lacerating wit and swoony romanticism.

"There's never been a great movie made in Bruges," Poesy says midway through the movie, at which point she's already been proven wrong. Not bad, February - we can almost forgive you for "Fool's Gold," and "The Eye," and "Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins," and (probably) "Vantage Point."