Colin Farrell delivers his most effective performance to date in a low-budget US drama, A Home at the End of the World, which opened in New York last Friday.

He is perfectly cast as Bobby Morrow, a sexually ambiguous and magnetically attractive Sixties child sharing a Greenwich Village apartment with a young gay man (newcomer Dallas Roberts) and a post-hippie older woman (Robin Wright Penn), both of whom fall in love with him. Adeptly adapted by Michael Cunningham from his own novel, and co-produced by actor Tom Hulce, this captivating film also features a remarkable Farrell lookalike, Erik Smith, playing Bobby as a 15-year-old.

Undeterred that Farrell punctuated his answers with "babe" when she interviewed him for the New York Times last week, Caryn James wrote: "He holds a screen with movie-star magnetism, but can he really act? Yes, and with exceptional range and subtlety, as viewers will see when he plays against type as a shy, vulnerable man." Citing Marlon Brando's "example of unfettered, still-complicated masculinity", New York Press critic Armond White noted in his review that "only Colin Farrell with his dark brows, quick smile and sly ease calls up the great man's ghost - he doesn't affect sensuality; he seems in touch with his natural sexual sensibility:"

However, some US media outlets continue to give over reams of column inches to the excision of Farrell's frontal nude scene and the reinsertion of his kiss with Roberts in the film, and Entertainment Weekly was so consumed with these aspects that they dominated last week's two-page Farrell feature, titled "The Naked Truth".