Colin Farrell

With 'The Batman' and 'After Yang' now in theaters, we're looking back on Colin Farrell's iconic performances, from indie films to action movies.

Enter 2015's The Lobster, starring Farrell as David, a schlubby man who, after his wife leaves him, is mandated as a single person to go to a hotel for 45 days and if he cannot find a partner in that timeframe, he'll be turned into an animal. For a man who looks like he does, Colin Farrell manages to be quite the shapeshifter, using his symmetrical face and floppy hair to play a cavalcade of sleezes and assholes. Farrell really is a perfect match for the Irish cynicism of Martin McDonagh, and that's perfectly on display in In Bruges. Here, he plays a depressed, misanthropic assassin who accidentally killed a child during a hit, and has been quasi banished to the quaint Brussels town of the title to await more instructions. In his charged-up dealings with Jamie Foxx's "Tubbs" and his speed-boat romance with Gong Li's Isabella, Farrell finds poetry and grace in a part that could have felt like an empty exercise in cool-guy iconography. Colin Farrell's gift is that he's a character actor in the body of an absolute dreamboat, and there's no greater evidence of this than his performance in Steve McQueen's Widows. When he's not coated in prosthetics, like he is playing the Penguin in The Batman, he uses those good looks to his advantage playing slimy creatures like alderman Jack Mulligan. In McQueen's underrated and fascinating heist film, Jack exemplifies a kind of old white Chicago politician with only thinly veiled disdain for the Black people he ostensibly represents. Farrell's observant interpretation finds a father trying to relate to his daughter through the prism of the robot she loves. Farrell lets that come through even when McQueen doesn't focus on his face: In the best scene we hear his dialogue even as the camera stays focused on the outside of his car. In the film he plays Jake, a tea shop owner living in a futuristic city. John Smith is a near-mythic figure in American history, but in Terrence Malick's lyrical depiction of the settlement of Virginia, Colin Farrell lends the reluctant explorer a rugged, rough around the edges characterization that melds well with Malick's mournful and complex version of our country's discovery. When the precogs suddenly predict that one of the program's officers, John Anderton (Cruise), is about to commit a murder, Witwer leads the manhunt for Anderton when the suspect goes into hiding. (It helps that Jack Bauer himself, Kiefer Sutherland, voices the pissed-off sniper.) Schumacher cast Farrell in the Vietnam War drama Tigerland, the actor's breakthrough movie, and the director shows a real understanding of his gifts here, weaponizing Farrell's vanity, charm, and vulnerability to make the audience squirm. That's what he does in Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled as Corporal McBurney, a union soldier who gets treated to the hospitality of a bunch of southern belles when they discover him wounded on the property of their all-girls school.

Colin Farrell is back in a big way. He appears in two movies released on Friday, "The Batman" and "After Yang."

Privacy CenterIf you turn this off, you will not receive personalized ads, but you will still receive ads. WarnerMedia uses data to improve and analyze its functionality and to tailor products, services, ads, and offers to your interests. Colin Farrell attends "The Batman" film premiere in New York on March 1, 2022.

Is this the actor's best comeback ever? Colin Farrell. Illustrated | Warner Bros., A24, iStock.

One scene, hardly one of the movie's biggest, has Jake visiting his neighbor's family to ask them some questions about Yang, and Farrell conveys reluctance, desperation, and a heavy dose of shame over his own prejudices in the single, awkward interaction. It's a performance that has to sit and sink in, much as the family's evolving grief does — requiring stillness that doesn't slip into the intentionally awkward formality of a Lanthimos film. But in the later part of his career, Farrell has seemed to do his best when he pushes himself to even greater extremes, on both ends of his range. On the other end, Farrell will don a plaid tracksuit, oversized spectacles, and a newsboy cap to play the ringleader for a group of young YouTube gangsters in Guy Ritchie's caper The Gentlemen. He doesn't always spring either persona when expected: for consummate weirdo Tim Burton, he played a gentle father in Dumbo, while the second season of the deeply serious HBO drama True Detective, he let his blackly funny screw-ups go over the top. On one side, he's become a quiet muse to directors like Yorgos Lanthimos, mastering the slightly remote humanity of dark comedies like The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Martin McDonagh, who operates in a more overtly comic register while still utilizing his star's deadpan. Farrell is an undisputed highlight of The Batman, just as he was in Daredevil, and for a similar reason: In a violent movie where the titular superhero broods grimly, Farrell punctures the seriousness around him.

Movies about the future tend to come in one of two forms, aesthetically: Cold Apple Store (gleaming white surfaces, chilly existentialism) or Unhinged ...

If you do not allow these cookies you may not be able to use or see these sharing tools.Turn off use of cookies for targeted advertising on this website. If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance.These cookies enable the website to provide enhanced functionality and personalisation. If you do not allow these cookies then some or all of these services may not function properly.These cookies are set by a range of social media services that we have added to the site to enable you to share our content with your friends and networks. Within those constraints, Turner-Smith and particularly Farrell work to add subtext to all the things that seem to go unspoken between Jake and Kyra — their marriage, if not exactly strained, certainly doesn't seem to be thriving — and Min (The Umbrella Academy) hints at depths that Yang, amiable to the point of blandness, rarely betrays. Characters speak in a hushed, almost flat affect, as if not to wake a giant sleeping in the next room, and veteran actors like Clifton Collins Jr. (as an eager-to-please neighbor) and Sarita Choudhury (as a bio-scientist anxious to study Yang's secrets) aren't given much to work with, beyond a few brief expositional scenes (and God bless, that title-card choreography.) Koganada, who premiered the film at Cannes ahead of its simultaneous release in theaters and on Showtime March 4, reveals all this in careful, often elliptical layers; the science and sequence of things seems to hold less interest for him than the overarching mood of it all. Together they've scraped together enough money to buy their little girl, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), an AI "sibling" (Justin H. Min) who functions as both a nanny-companion and a sort of informal cultural attaché, affirming and exploring Mika's Asian heritage in ways her adoptive parents can't. Yang, a so-called techno-sapien or just "techno," looks and acts like any ordinary man, albeit one with exceptional patience and a seemingly endless well of what the family affectionately calls "Chinese fun facts."

Colin Farrell features as Penguin, aka Oswald Cobblepot, in "The Batman" that opens in theaters today, March 4. Farrell took advantage of his Penguin get-up ...

Perhaps Penguin will smoke a cigar in the new series. The get-up allowed Colin some privacy in the real world, and he took advantage of it. "The Batman" should clean up at the box office.

Colin Farrell underwent quite the transformation to become Oswald Cobblepot/the Penguin in Matt Reeves' The Batman, wearing a fat suit, prosthetics and fake ...

“If certain circumstances of my life were different, were I a little less bent toward healing and more toward vindication, I could have been a darkly powerful person.” Where do you even start? He excuses his actions by saying it was genuine love, that made him act “out of control”. “I know how I could easily have moved in the direction of becoming a dictator myself,” she said. So instead of taking paracetamol next time you have a headache considering binge watch Reeling in the Years or think of pink Snack bars (gone, but never forgotten). Scientists in China have discovered that mild aches and pains can dissipate with a healthy dose of nostalgia. Colin Farrell underwent quite the transformation to become Oswald Cobblepot/the Penguin in Matt Reeves’ The Batman, wearing a fat suit, prosthetics and fake dentures.