In Bruges

Martin McDonagh is an award winning Anglo-Irish writer and director.
He won an Oscar for the film Six Shooter in 2006.

IMDB
Wikipedia
Irish Writers Online

The considerable pleasures of In Bruges begin with its title, which suggests a glumly self-important art film but actually fits a rattling-good tale of two Irish gangsters "keepin' a low profile" after a murder gone messily wrong. Bruges, the best-preserved medieval town in Belgium, is where the bearlike veteran Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and newbie triggerman Ray (Colin Farrell) have been ordered by their London boss to hole up for two weeks. As the sly narrative unfolds like a paper flower in water, "in Bruges" also becomes a state of mind, a suspended moment amid centuries-old towers and bridges and canals when even thuggish lives might experience a change in direction. And throughout, the viewer has ample opportunity to consider whose pronunciation of "Bruges" is more endearing, Gleeson's or Farrell's. The movie marks the feature writing-directing debut of playwright Martin McDonagh, whose droll meditation on sudden mortality, Six Shooter, copped the 2005 Oscar for best live-action short. Although McDonagh clearly relishes the musicality of his boyos' brogue and has written them plenty of entertaining dialogue, In Bruges is no stageplay disguised as a film. The script is deceptively casual, allowing for digressions on the newly united and briskly thriving Europe, and annexing passers-by as characters who have a way of circling back into the story with unanticipatable consequences. That includes a film crew--shooting a movie featuring, to Ray's fascination, "a midget" (Jordan Prentice)--and a fetching blond production assistant (Clémence Poésy) whose job description keeps evolving. There's one other key figure: Harry, the Cockney gang boss whose omnipotence remains unquestioned as long as he remains offscreen, back in England, as if floating in an early Harold Pinter play. Harry has reasons inextricably tender and perverse for selecting Bruges as his hirelings' destination, and eventually he emerges from the aether to express them--first as a garrulous telephone voice and then in the volatile form of Ralph Fiennes. By that point the charmed moment of suspension, already shaken by several irruptions of violence, is pretty well doomed. But In Bruges continues to surprise and satisfy right up to the end.

Colin Farrell

IMDB
Squidoo

Ralph Fiennes

IMDB
Squidoo

Brendan Gleeson

IMDB

"If I'd grown up on a farm and was retarded, Bruges might impress me. But I didn't, so it doesn't."
    - Ray (Colin Farrell)

"Bruges, even midgets have to take drugs to stick it."
    - Ray (Colin Farrell)

"One gay beer for my gay friend, one normal beer for me because I am normal."
    - Ray (Colin Farrell)

"An Uzi? I'm not from South Central Los Angeles. I didn't come here to shoot twenty black ten year olds in a drive-by. I want a normal gun for a normal person."
    - Harry (Ralph Fiennes)

"Sometimes it's shockingly poignant and touching; at other times, it's a gripping crime drama; then it veers back to comedy. If Guy Ritchie sat down, took a couple of deep, cleansing breaths, and put as much thought as energy and style into his films, they'd look almost exactly like this."
    - Tasha Robinson, The Onion A.V. Club