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Birdman (Or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) review – a delirious, hallucinatory showbiz comedy

Michael Keaton is tremendous as the superhero movie star trying to reinvent himself as a serious actor in this freaky-deaky flight of fancy from Alejandro González Iñárritu

Interview: Michael Keaton

Y ou’ll believe a man can fly. Or you’ll believe that believing you can fly and flying are sort of the same thing. Either way, Alejandro González Iñárritu achieves takeoff in a big way with his crazy, freaky-deaky, hellzapoppin’ showbiz comedy Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). I certainly levitated with enjoyment. What is this? The Wings of Desire, as directed by Mel Brooks? At certain moments, watching it felt like inhaling laughing gas mixed with helium. And the technically extraordinary “flight” sequence looked very much like dreams of flying I’ve had myself.

It’s shot in one single take, without cuts (but with a few seamless digital sutures) and depicts the escalating anxiety attack being suffered by a failing movie star called Riggan Thomson, played with fiercely tender self-pity by Michael Keaton . Poor Riggan has haughtily abandoned the dumb superhero role of Birdman that made him rich and famous, and is now trying for credibility by starring in his own self-financed Broadway stage adaptation of a Raymond Carver story. He has hired his lawyer buddy Jake (Zach Galifianakis) to produce, and his daughter Sam (Emma Stone) to be his personal assistant, in a pathetic attempt to make up for neglecting her in childhood while away shooting those hateful Birdman films – an abandonment that contributed to her drug issues.

Divorced Riggan is now in a semi-covert relationship with co-star Laura (Andrea Riseborough), who wants a baby; however, she also has a Sapphic tendresse for the show’s leading lady, Lesley (Naomi Watts), who must act opposite her own boyfriend, Mike Shiner, a hyperactive, narcissistic method-acting diva hilariously played by Edward Norton. As opening night approaches, the pressure is causing Riggan to hallucinate, and he is visited by the granite-voiced figure of Birdman , the superhero monster he created, ordering him to forget the theatre and reclaim his chief superpower: making movie megabucks.

It is a film that has been wildly hailed by the critics, despite – I am sorry to say – depicting critics as fatuous, shallow, parasitic and prejudiced. At one stage, in an excitable impromptu casting discussion, Mike Shiner’s own popularity with the critics is discussed: “They want to spooge on him!” “Right on his face!” As for Iñárritu, he’s getting the facial-spooge-tsunami he deserves, showing a glorious capacity for comedy I hadn’t suspected from his earlier, more solemn movies like 21 Grams , Babel or Biutiful . This does, however, finally display those movies’ tendency towards what I can only describe as plangent romantic seriousness.

Something in the jittery, crazy dialogue makes it sometimes hard to tell if the characters are talking as themselves, or performing the Carver dialogue. Riggan himself will roam the peeling, faintly nightmarish theatre corridors and burst out into the (genuine) crowded New York street – a bravura single-take staging in one unitary space that gives the movie the excitement of some experimental theatrical happening. And the unbroken take is weirdly reminiscent of the first-person point-of-view movies like Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void or indeed Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake . There is simply something disturbing in the unending, relentless single view. As the restless action unfolds, you’ll hear strange passages of music, orchestral swells or insistent nerve-jangling jazz drumming – music that may or may not be diegetic . Is Riggan using it as background music in the show? Can the characters hear it as well as us?

And all the time, poor Riggan is approaching a mental breakdown due to the imminent critical and commercial catastrophe; and he can’t quite admit to himself that he is addicted to celebrity, though he is unsure how to renegotiate his declining position as a famous person in the alien new world of reality shows and social media. Amusingly, he confesses to a horrendous status-anxiety episode while on a plane with George Clooney – like Clooney, Michael Keaton himself played Batman in that pre-Nolan era when superheroes were not quite as ubiquitous as they are now. Riggan doesn’t want to renounce his celebrity. He wants to upgrade it, improve it, make it classier. Deep in his heart, he prefers the acclaim of strangers to intimacy with his wife and daughter. And there is a brilliant, farcical moment when he is locked out of the theatre just before needing to go on, and the only way to the stage is through the public front-of-house entrance. The situation is every star’s worst nightmare: having to somehow prove your importance and validate your existence from scratch. Birdman is a delicious and delirious pleasure.

Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
Michael Keaton
Alejandro González Iñárritu

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Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Birdman’

The director alejandro g. iñárritu narrates a sequence from “birdman or the unexpected virtue of ignorance” with michael keaton and edward norton..

By Manohla Dargis

Oct. 16, 2014

“Birdman,” a big bang of movie razzle-dazzle from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, opens with a winking sleight of hand. Riggan Thomson, a Hollywood has-been turned Broadway second-chancer played by a blissed-out Michael Keaton, is hanging out in his dressing room at the St. James Theater in Times Square, by which I mean floating, like a mystic who’s passed transcendence and gone straight to nirvana. It’s a destabilizing liftoff for a funny, frenetic, buoyant and rambunctiously showboating entertainment in which Mr. Iñárritu himself rises high and then higher still.

Movie Review: ‘Birdman’

The times critic manohla dargis reviews “birdman.”.

It’s a nice change of direction for Mr. Iñárritu, who has tended to pull viewers low and then lower in beautiful bummer movies, like his last one, “Biutiful,” about a terminally ill man who communes with the dead. For “Birdman,” he has lightened both his mood and metaphysical load to productive effect by concentrating on Riggan’s efforts to stage — as writer, director and star — an adaptation of the Raymond Carver short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” It sounds like an alarming idea (and a strange fit, especially given Carver’s minimalism and Mr. Iñárritu’s maximalism), yet Riggan has bet his career on it in hopes that the play will deliver him from his ignoble, lucrative past playing a screen superhero called Birdman.

Did someone say Icarus? Well, no, that name doesn’t come up in this backstage comedy (and sometimes drama), at least not that I remember, although Mr. Iñárritu and his co-writers (Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr. and Armando Bo) toss others including Roland Barthes, Jorge Luis Borges and Martin Scorsese. The story is as old as time — the play’s the thing, once again — and unwinds over several dreamily integrated days and nights that take Riggan from his meditative calm through the labyrinthine halls of the St. James in the hours and minutes leading up to the opening, during which (big breath): He rehearses an actor, receives a kiss, throws a punch, downs a drink, smokes a joint, walks a street and waxes poetic, comic, tragic and melodramatic.

Embracing the principle of more, Mr. Iñárritu packs the movie with multitudes, assorted backstage shenanigans, showbiz clichés and commedia dell’arte types. As Riggan moves onstage and off, from rehearsal to dressing room, he finds romance in the wings, instigates a little cloak and dagger, and powers through some heart-to-heart encounters with his rehabbed daughter, Sam (a wonderful Emma Stone in sexy-cynical ragamuffin mode). A supercilious theater actor, Mike, played by a pitch-perfect, perfectly cast Edward Norton, challenges Riggan mentally and physically by declaring his allegiance to the theater (truth or bust!) at one point wielding a copy of Borges’s “Labyrinths” so ostentatiously that even the most myopic moviegoer should be able to read the title.

Action creates reaction, and together they create flowing, organic form in “Birdman.” Riggan isn’t the only man on the move: So is Mr. Iñárritu, who has staged and shot the movie so that it looks like everything that happens, from airborne beginning to end, occurs during one transporting continuous take. The camera doesn’t just move with the story and characters, it also ebbs and flows like water, soars and swoops like a bird, its movement as fluid as a natural element, as animated as a living organism. (Like that famous Steadicam shot in “ GoodFellas ” but longer.) Mr. Iñárritu’s partner in illusionism is the director of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki , a Houdini of fluid camera movements whose genius is for keeping you watching rather than distractedly wondering.

The camerawork in “Birdman” is an astonishment, and an argument that everything flows together, which in this movie means the cinematography, the story, the people, even time and space. And as soon as Riggan floats down to earth, a series of walls — between character and actor, onstage and off, representation and reality — begin to collapse. The most obvious divide is between Mr. Keaton, who, starting in 1989, played Batman in two movies directed by Tim Burton, and Riggan, who made a killing playing Birdman, a feathered franchise jackpot. Years later, Riggan appears haunted by Birdman, whose image stares out from a poster hanging in the actor’s dressing room and who, in a creepy basso profundo rasp, offers a stream of Sammy Glick-isms about career and fame.

A few movies back, Mr. Iñárritu parted ways with his frequent collaborator, the writer Guillermo Arriaga. The two had joined forces with the 2000 triptych “Amores Perros” and then proceeded to win new admirers and detractors with other multi-stranded narratives, “21 Grams” and “Babel.” I fell for “21 Grams” despite its absurdities, largely on the strength of its performances by the likes of Naomi Watts, who, in “Birdman,” plays an actress, Lesley. But Mr. Iñárritu lost me with “Babel,” less because of its melodramatic excesses than because of its mechanistic quality and sanctimony. “Birdman” marshals its enjoyable excesses into a rigorous form, too, but here a newly generous Mr. Iñárritu has made room for the audience’s pleasure.

He’s also given the finger wagging a rest. To that end, it’s worth drawing your eye to the small card stuck on one of the mirrors in Riggan’s dressing room that reads, “A thing is a thing not what is said of that thing.” It sounds a bit like Gertrude Stein or poorly translated Kant, but is attributed to Susan Sontag. It may be a gloss on a line from “Against Interpretation,” her book of essays on impoverished criticism and its “shadow world of ‘meanings.' ” (“A work of art is a thing in the world,” she writes, “not just a text or commentary on the world.”) There’s plenty to embrace in Sontag’s polemic, though a critic can perhaps be forgiven for rooting around in the shadow world of meanings if the artwork has cloaked itself in Meaning and Importance, as some of Mr. Iñárritu’s movies have done.

You can dig or just skate in this significantly better new one, the full title of which is “Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.” That phrase appears late in the movie, by which time Riggan has dodged various bullets, including a lover, Laura (Andrea Riseborough, amusing); an ex-wife, Sylvia (Amy Ryan, touching); and his frantic producer, Jake (Zach Galifianakis, deftly funny). Riggan has also crossed paths with a terribly mean theater critic for The New York Times, the rhymes-with-witch Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan), who threatens to close his play before seeing it. Her threat provokes a savage verbal assault on her from Riggan, an invective that by its very heat, expresses a conflicted desire for her benediction. This, you see, is also what we talk about when we talk about love.

“Birdman” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Bloodshed and words.

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Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)

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Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) Reviews

...a film that is just as much about the film industry itself, as it is about the pursuit of happiness, and our ridiculously desperate need to be admired, recognized, and respected by people that shouldn’t really matter to us.

Full Review | Apr 15, 2024

If the theater frame story in Birdman plays a self-reflexive role, this is nothing but a manifestation of Hollywood's need to return back to its narrative roots.

Full Review | Feb 21, 2024

When Keaton's perfection is combined with the film's bracing, topical, and strong social commentary on Hollywood, Broadway, acting, fame, and celebrity for this different modern world, "Birdman" becomes even larger of an achievement.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 16, 2024

Michael Keaton is incredible as the washed-up, disillusioned actor hoping a Broadway play will revive his career. The black comedy plays on an irreverent version of Keaton’s own career while being a wholly original satire on celebrity and super heroes.

Full Review | Jun 14, 2023

A creative tour de force for Alejandro González Iñárritu and some comeback for Michael Keaton.

Full Review | Apr 20, 2023

Two hours later, I felt as if my initial disinterest had been validated the hard way...

Full Review | Jan 24, 2023

It’s not quite as miserable and tragedy-driven as his past films and that’s refreshing. But Iñárritu is still a director who can suffocate his story with his style and high concepts.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 19, 2022

The film has a reflective—if not precognitive—purpose for Keaton by signifying the actor’s artistic breakthrough in Birdman after years out of the spotlight.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 18, 2022

While the film's technical prowess gives the audience much to digest from scene to scene, Birdman largely succeeds on the strength of its cast.

Full Review | Sep 22, 2021

Serious as a poodle in a miniskirt sipping on an apple martini

Full Review | Jul 2, 2021

What could have been a stunt turns into a visual rollercoaster that propels the action forward constantly while creating a unique and stylish palette for the story.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 2, 2021

Here not a single performance falters.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Dec 4, 2020

The entire film was shot to resemble a single long take and its cast included Edward Norton, Zach Galifianakis, and Emma Stone. Need we say more?

Full Review | Oct 28, 2020

In general, Birdman is entertaining (Keaton and Norton are both excellent), although somewhat overheated

Full Review | Aug 13, 2020

Birdman: or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance is a highly imaginative film that delivers on a compelling story and brilliantly executed technique with the camera.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 17, 2020

A big, bold movie, the kind that takes aesthetic and thematic risks, and that grabs you from frame one and practically screams at you to pay attention. It's also very convinced of its own cleverness.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Jul 7, 2020

That analogy of the ups and downs of fame that shakes actors in the entertainment culture, is what keeps it flying at the heights of the best movies of the year. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 26, 2020

...this is one film that deserves the descriptor of tour de force.

Full Review | Mar 11, 2020

A sprawling, thrilling film that, for better and worse, is one of the most fully realized personal visions to hit screens in years.

Full Review | Jan 9, 2020

When it comes to filmmaking, the Michael Keaton-starring Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is a unique achievement in cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 2, 2020

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Film Review: ‘Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)’

Michael Keaton pulls off a startling comeback in Alejandro G. Inarritu's blistering showbiz satire.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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A quarter-century after “Batman” ushered in the era of Hollywood mega-tentpoles — hollow comicbook pictures manufactured to enthrall teens and hustle merch — a penitent Michael Keaton returns with the comeback of the century, “ Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance),” a blisteringly hot-blooded, defiantly anti-formulaic look at a has-been movie star’s attempts to resuscitate his career by mounting a vanity project on Broadway. In a year overloaded with self-aware showbiz satires, Alejandro G. Inarritu’s fifth and best feature provides the delirious coup de grace — a triumph on every creative level, from casting to execution, that will electrify the industry, captivate arthouse and megaplex crowds alike, send awards pundits into orbit and give fresh wings to Keaton’s career.

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For his Broadway debut, Riggan has selected Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” adapting the short story in such a way as to give himself all the glory, from the bathetic monologue that comes just before intermission, to the ballistic finale (invented for the play), which sees his character blowing his brains out moments before the curtain falls. This is a movie-star approach to theater, where truly great stage actors let their co-stars shine. But then, Riggan has something to prove, surrounding himself with pros — including a respected old friend (Naomi Watts) and the much younger actress he happens to be shagging (Andrea Riseborough) — in hopes that they make him look better. And when an accident allows Riggan to replace a weak player with someone better, Mike (Edward Norton), he leaps at the chance, clearly unprepared for what sharing the spotlight with a real actor entails.

If agreeing to play Birdman represented some sort of artistic sellout earlier in Riggan’s career (a compromise compounded when he agreed to make two sequels), then this Carver play ought to earn back his cred. Or so he figures, surrounding himself with a yes-man producer (Zach Galifianakis, in masterfully subtle control of his comedic impulses, except for one moment, where he inexplicably mispronounces “Martin Scorsees”) and other sycophants. Riggan has even gone so far as to convince himself that he has telekinetic powers, using his mind to move objects and taking advice from the disembodied voice of Birdman (Keaton’s own, lowered a register). But his druggie daughter/assistant, Sam (Emma Stone), calls his bluff, eviscerating his irrelevance in a rant sure to win over a generation too young to have seen Tim Burton’s “Batman.”

This is perhaps one of the unexpected virtues of ignorance referred to by the film’s evocative full title: Riggan approaches the Carver play without all the baggage of a traditional Broadway actor, but then, theatergoers approach it with different expectations as well, ranging from the spiteful prejudgment of a jaded New York Times critic (Lindsay Duncan, trying to seem her Meryl Streepiest) to the naivete of youth. (Oh, to pluck out Sam’s eyes and see Broadway through them!) The film virtually overflows with references, to contemporary blips such as Justin Bieber and established minds like Roland Barthes, managing to be simultaneously crude and urbane, while speaking to different audiences on whatever intellectual level they prefer.

As for intent, Inarritu and co-writers Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr., Armando Bo are clearly taking a generational stand with this script, which mourns a time when Hollywood actors had the chance to play flawed and fascinating men, as opposed to one-dimensional supermen. Like last year’s “The Great Beauty,” “Birdman” finds itself parsing a deep creative and existential crisis, never allowing its justifiable cynicism to drown out what idealism remains, even as it observes that our finest screen actors — Michael Fassbender, Robert Downey Jr. and Jeremy Renner among them — are all cashing comicbook paychecks these days (even as it conveniently pretends that Norton’s “Hulk” never happened).

Norton very nearly steals the show from Keaton at one point. Revealing body and soul alike, both stars are inviting us to laugh at aspects of their real selves, though Norton initially seems the more impressive actor, amplifying his own intense commitment to realism to absurd extremes — with the hilarious result that finding himself in the moment during an early performance proves a rather dramatic cure for his character’s offstage impotence. At first, Keaton doesn’t seem capable of reaching as deep, either in reality or as Riggan, though that’s before the humiliation of wandering through Times Square crowds nearly naked.

“Birdman” offers by far the most fascinating meta-deconstruction of an actor’s ego since “Being John Malkovich,” and one that leaves no room for vanity. From the moment Keaton first removes his wig to the sight of him wrapped in Batman-like facial bandages, his performance reveals itself in layers. The role demands that he appear superficial and stiff onstage, while behaving anything but as the character’s personal troubles mount and his priorities begin to align — at which point, he appears in a dual role, donning the ridiculous Birdman costume to hover, seen only by Riggan, like a cracked-out version of Broadway’s own “Harvey.”

Judged by Howard Hawks’ quality standard — “three great scenes, no bad ones” — “Birdman” features at least a dozen of the year’s most electrifying onscreen moments (scrambled, so as to avoid spoilers): the levitation, the hallucination, the accident, the fitting, the daughter, the critic, the ex-wife, the erection, the kiss, the shot, the end and Times Square. Most films would be lucky to have one scene as indelible as any of these, and frankly, it’s a thrill to see Inarritu back from whatever dark, dreary place begat “21 Grams,” “Babel” and “Biutiful,” three phony, contrived melodramas engineered to manipulate, while posing as gritty commentaries on the harsh world we inhabit.

With “Birdman,” the director has broken from his rut of relying on shaky handheld camerawork to suggest “realism,” or an invasive Gustavo Santaolalla score to force the desired reactions, instead finding fresh ways to delve into the human condition. (He has even altered his onscreen credit, condensing “Gonzalez” to a mere “G.,” as if to acknowledge this new chapter.) Yes, the film is preoccupied with an aging actor’s psyche, but it also addresses fatherhood, marriage, personal integrity and the enduring question of the legacy we leave behind — as in an amusing scene in which Riggan imagines being upstaged by “Batman and Robin” star George Clooney in his obituary. Above all, it is an extremely clever adaptation of Carver’s short story, simultaneously postmodern (ironically, a rather retro label) in its meta self-parody and cutting-edge, owing to the dynamism of its style.

Circling shark-like around Keaton, then darting off to stalk other actors, Lubezki’s camera is alert and engaged at all times, an active participant in the nervous backstage drama. Taking a cue from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope,” the meticulously blocked shoot cleverly finds ways to mask cuts, using invisible visual effects to stitch together various scenes so it appears that the entire film is one continuous take, even though the events take place over several weeks and in various midtown Gotham locations — primarily Broadway’s St. James Theater, but venturing out anywhere that Riggan can walk or Birdman can fly.

In addition to being a virtuoso stunt in its own right, this single-shot illusion serves to address the critique that screen acting is somehow less demanding than stage acting, since there are no conventional editing tricks in place to shape the performances. The cast has no choice but to ante up, which everyone does in spades, and the film is built generously enough that everyone gets ample time to impress (although it should be noted that none of the background sexual intrigues amount to anything).

Inarritu’s approach is mind-boggling in its complexity, nearly as demanding on Lubezki as “Gravity” must have been, such that even seemingly minor jokes, as when the camera spies the drummer responsible for the pic’s restless jazz score (by Antonio Sanchez) lurking on the edge of the frame, had to be perfectly timed. It’s all one big magic trick, one designed to remind how much actors give to their art even as it disguises the layers of work that go into it.

Reviewed at Gaumont screening room, Paris, Aug. 20, 2014. (In Venice Film Festival — opener, competing; Telluride, New York film festivals.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 119 MIN.

Production: A Fox Searchlight Pictures release presented with Regency Enterprises of a New Regency/M Prods./Le Grisbi production, in association with TSG Entertainment, financed in association with Worldview Entertainment. Produced by Alejandro G. Inarritu, John Lesher, Arnon Milchan, James W. Skotchdopole. Executive producers, Christopher Woodrow, Molly Conners, Sarah E. Johnson.
Crew: Directed by Alejandro G. Inarritu. Screenplay, Inarritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., Armando Bo; play based on the story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver. Camera (color), Emmanuel Lubezki; editors, Douglas Crise, Stephen Mirrione; music, Antonio Sanchez; production designer, Kevin Thompson; art director, Stephen H. Carter; set decorator, George DeTitta Jr.; costume designer, Albert Wolsky; sound (Dolby Digital/Datasat), Thomas Varga; supervising sound editor, Martin Hernandez; sound designers, Hernandez, Aaron Glascock, Peter A. Brown; re-recording mixers, Skip Leavsay, Tom Ozanich, Jon Taylor, Frank A. Montano; visual effects producer, Ivy Agregan; visual effects, Rodeo FX; special effects coordinators, Johann Kunz, Conrad Brink; Birdman suit creator, Mike Elizalde’s Spectral Motion; stunt coordinator, Stephen Pope; associate producers, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr., Armando Bo; assistant director, Peter Kohn; casting, Francine Maisler.
With: Michael Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Lindsay Duncan, Merritt Wever, Jeremy Shamos, Bill Camp, Damian Young.

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DVD & Streaming

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Comedy , Drama , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

October 17, 2014
Michael Keaton as Riggan Thomson; Emma Stone as Sam; Edward Norton as Mike; Naomi Watts as Lesley; Andrea Riseborough as Laura; Zach Galifianakis as Jake; Amy Ryan as Sylvia

Home Release Date

Alejandro González Iñárritu

Distributor

Fox Searchlight

Movie Review

Riggan Thomson once flew.

He was a hero then. No, a superhero. Decked out in a beaked mask and metallic feathers, Riggan’s Birdman swooped into the culture on silver screens like a glorious golden goose, making Riggan a worldwide celebrity and launching the cinema superhero genre we’re so familiar with today. Robert Downey Jr., Christian Bale and the rest should be paying Riggan royalties, for cryin’ out loud.

But Riggan turned his back on Birdman decades ago, believing that he was meant to do more with his career than run around in a suit full of high-tech fletching. And now, losing hair and gaining pounds, he has one last chance to prove himself to be an honest-to-goodness actor here on a dingy corner of the Great White Way.

Long ago, Riggan received a note from celebrated writer Raymond Carver complimenting his thespian abilities. It inspired Riggan to keep to the craft. Now, in an expensive act of homage, Riggan has adapted Carver’s story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” to the stage—a production which Riggan produces, directs and stars in. He’s given everything to it—his time, his talent, his money, perhaps even his sanity—in a bid to put Birdman behind him and prove Carver’s faith in him was not misplaced.

It’s not going well. He’s running out of cash. His girlfriend and co-star, Laura, announces she’s pregnant. His daughter and assistant, Sam, is still ticked pops sent her to rehab. He landed a certifiable Broadway luminary for one of the supporting roles, but the guy might be certifiably crazy, too.

And then there’s Birdman himself—a tangible manifestation of all Riggan’s insecurities, regrets and simmering rage—sitting on a couch or crouching on a toilet, growling recriminations and adulations in equal measure. You’re better than these clowns. This play is a joke. You’re a joke.

The show must go on, they say. And so Riggan soldiers through the nightmare, rehearsal after rehearsal, preview after preview. There is no Plan B—no movie scripts in the mailbox, no television show in the wings. This play is his everything. And perhaps if—no, when —it’s a success, he’ll finally feel vindicated, fulfilled, complete . He will soar again, this time as not just a fabricated superhero, but a validated actor.

And the Birdman in his dressing room will finally shut his beak.

[ Spoilers are contained in the following sections. ]

Positive Elements

For all his faults and narcissism, Riggan loves his daughter and still cherishes his ex-wife, Sylvia. He hasn’t been a particularly good father, but we see him try to make it up to Sam as much as his self-obsession and play-driven panic allow him to. He hopes that being his assistant will give Sam direction in the wake of her rehab. He compliments her on her work. He apologizes to her for failing as a father. Sam rejects Riggan’s efforts at every turn at first. But then Mike, the celebrated Broadway actor, asks her the worst thing Riggan did to make her hate him so.

“He was never there!” she complains. And then when he stares at her, waiting for more, she says that it drove her crazy, how he always tried to make up for his absence by “constantly trying to convince me that I was special …”

She trails off, realizing that, perhaps, her dad wasn’t as bad as she thinks. And it sparks at least the hope of some form of reconciliation.

Spiritual Elements

Arguably, Birdman’ s biggest conflict is between Riggan’s own insecurity and ego. One side of him feels woefully undone in the midst of Broadway’s storied trappings. The other—voiced by Birdman—believes it’s all beneath him. He was a star, after all. And on some level, Birdman believes that should mean he’s something akin to a god.

Riggan’s flickering sense of power sometimes manifests in the form of telekinesis. When we first see him, he’s meditating in his underwear—floating a foot off the floor. When he throws a fit in his dressing room, he tears it apart by merely pointing a finger. When he fights with his daughter, he slowly twirls a cigarette case with his mind. He flies at one point.

As a counterpoint, Sam stresses how insignificant we all are. In rehab, she was required to make dashes on rolls of toilet paper—each dash representing a thousand years of the supposedly billions that the universe has been around. A handful of TP squares represents the 150,000 years of human existence. To her, Riggan is way too full of himself. “You’re scared to death like the rest of us that you don’t matter!” she accuses.

Sexual Content

When Mike’s first brought into Riggan’s play, he’s in a relationship with Lesley, one of Riggan’s co-stars. Someone asks Lesley how she knows Mike, and she says they “share a vagina.” As lovers in the play as well, one scene requires they be in bed together. During a preview performance, Mike asks Lesley to have sex with him for real on stage—for the sake of making the performance as “honest” as possible. (She refuses.) We see (through underwear) that he is aroused.

A mishap forces Riggan to run around outside in his underwear as tourists and theatergoers gawk and take pictures. There’s talk of affairs and erectile dysfunction, incest and sexual abuse, along with sexual acts, body parts and predilections (including someone’s pornographic collection of “nuns in diapers”). Sam and Mike flirt, kiss and make out, and she watches him disrobe for costume measurements. (We see his bare backside.) Lesley also undresses in the costume area, revealing her bra. When Laura tells Riggan she’s pregnant, she pulls his hand to her crotch and breast. The two kiss several times. Lesley also winds up kissing Laura.

Violent Content

Riggan and Mike get into a comical punching-and-shoving fight. (Mike is wearing only a pair of revealing swim trunks.) When Riggan demolishes his dressing room, the floor is left littered with wreckage and broken glass. Someone is knocked out and badly injured by a falling stage light.

We hear characters talk about how a fellow actor shot himself in the head and survived. “The blood coming out of his eye was the most honest thing he’s done so far,” we hear. The conversation foreshadows Riggan’s own suicidal tendencies. He admits that when Sylvia caught him having sex with someone else, he went to the beach with the intention of drowning himself. He turned back when he was attacked by jellyfish. And when Riggan’s at his lowest, we watch him jump off a building (only he flies instead of falling).

Sylvia tells Riggan she left him because “you threw a kitchen knife at me.” Riggan lies about being beaten by his dad. There’s a joke about Sam committing suicide. In a fantasy sequence-cum-action movie scene, mayhem ensues and helicopters explode. In the play, Riggan uses a fake gun to shoot himself in the head, spewing fake blood all over himself and his fellow actors. But on one occasion he trades the fake gun for a real one and winds up shooting off his nose. (After receiving a standing ovation, he’s rushed to the hospital.)

Crude or Profane Language

More than 100 f-words and close to 50 s-words. We also hear multiple uses of “c–ks–ker,” “d–k,” “a–,” “b–ch” and “h—.” God’s name is misused 15 or more times, often with “d–n.” Jesus’ name is abused two or three times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Riggan finds one of Sam’s hidden joints—which he finishes off. (He also smokes cigarettes.) Lesley wonders aloud whether Sam’s so weird because of all the drugs she’s used. Mike, who’s supposed to be drunk during one of the play’s scenes, replaces a fake bottle of liquor with a real one, pouring glass after glass during a performance. (He angrily breaks part of the set when Riggan takes the booze away.) Mike and Riggan go to a bar and order drinks. They talk about somebody else being drunk. Riggan tries to use alcohol to butter up a theater critic. (When he’s rebuffed, he smashes a glass.)

Before the action begins, Birdman audiences are treated to a poem snippet from Raymond Carver—said to be carved into his tombstone:

_And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth._

Riggan longs to feel beloved . He was and is celebrated as Birdman: People still ask him for autographs and pictures. But the days when he soared above the acting world are gone. And his life now is not enough. He laments that he is disappearing into himself. He wants to be loved once again.

“You confuse love with admiration,” his ex-wife admonishes him, and it’s true. His worth is set by a roomful of strangers. And to please them, anyone who might really love him was set aside like a piece of furniture.

There’s a lot going on in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) . The movie ruminates on the tension between film and theater. It grapples with the irony of “honest” performances and dishonest lives. It asks us which is really more valid and valued: The review of one critic from The New York Times or the uninformed “shares” of millions on social networks. It even struggles with the lines between reality and fantasy.

Mostly, Birdman darts back and forth between love and admiration—that core disconnect between Riggan and those who want to care for him. Its end is deeply ambiguous. We’re not told whether Riggan ever finds the peace he so desperately seeks, or whether he succumbs to his growling Birdman—sinking into insanity or oblivion or both.

The cinematic sex, drugs, alcohol, foul language and freaky, enigmatic worldview continually push moviegoers off balance, much as Riggan is himself. The attempt at resolution: Riggan is finally alone with his daughter so long estranged. She rests her head on his chest as he strokes her hair. Together for once. Together at last. She lets go of anger. He sets aside his craving for accolades. And for a moment, at least, they are father and daughter again, counting themselves beloved.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) Review

01 Jan 2015

119 minutes

Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance)

At one point during Birdman, Michael Keaton’s Riggan Thomson, a former movie star-turned-wannabe artist, deludes himself that he is his superhero persona, Birdman, skimming through the skyscrapers of New York at a dizzying speed. It’s an image that could stand for the film itself: untethered, a feel for the slightly ridiculous, completely exhilarating. Escaping the heavy gloom of 21 Grams, Babel and Biutiful, Alejandro González Iñárritu (credited here as Alejandro G. Iñárritu) has conjured up something that takes on board Huge Issues — sanity, narcissism, parenthood, marriage, creative integrity, artistic legacy — but with a directness and lightness rarely present in his back catalogue.

It could be termed this year’s Gravity, and not because they share a Mexican director and DP Emmanuel Lubezki. Like Cuarón’s film, Birdman soars on a purely cinematic imagination, defying formula, expressing ideas in completely visual ways. As an exercise in pure technique, it is daring, exacting and will leave you head-scratching in a how-did-they-pull-that-off? way. But the form always serves the substance.

A compelling portrait of artistic angst and existential collapse, it starts as a black comedy of theatrical hubris but slowly morphs into something more affecting and poignant. It’s a tour de force not only from Michael Keaton but everyone involved, and awards will surely follow. But this is a film that neither covets or needs gongs. It is spectacularly unclassifiable.

For all its superhero accoutrements, Birdman, on the outside at least, is a let’s-put-on-a-play-right-here farce. Faded movie star Thomson has staked the last of his superhero savings on writing, directing and starring in a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in a last-ditch attempt to claw back a shard of artistic integrity. Iñárritu and writers Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris and Armando Bo pile on every backstage drama you can think of: there are more than enough accidents (minor and tragic), secret liaisons, creative disputes and unwanted erections to power a dozen Noises Offs. But these aren’t toothless hijinks. There are pointed stabs at needy stage types, imperious New York critics (Lindsay Duncan briefly but memorably sketches an icy reviewer waiting to kill Riggan’s play in a heartbeat) and contemporary theatre’s reliance on movie stars to pull in the punters. Other cultural touchstones don’t get off scot-free either — there are jabs at the highbrow (French theorist Roland Barthes), the populist (Justin Bieber) and the likes of Michael Fassbender, Robert Downey Jr. and Jeremy Renner for donning cowls for cash. Edward Norton’s Hulk is given a pass. Not even Birdman is that meta.

At the eye of the drama is Keaton’s Thomson undergoing the mother of all meltdowns, the opening image of a dying star a pre-emptive suggestion that Riggan’s interior crisis may be happening at a cosmic level. In our first glimpse of the actor, he is levitating in his dressing room, his mind so out of whack that he is convinced he has telekinetic powers, verbally wrestling with Birdman (Keaton in a Christian Bale-esque lower register), who constantly taunts him that he craves public adulation. If the film gets a frisson from the career parallels between Riggan and Keaton — Riggan did one more Birdman that Keaton did Batman — the actor gives it so much more, treading a tightrope between self-doubt and narcissism as he slowly reveals an actor’s fracturing psyche before our eyes. This isn’t stunt casting. This is a great actor on the form of his life pitching a flawed human being and a monstrous alter-ego and making you connect with both.

If it were built around Keaton alone, Birdman would be strong enough, but Iñárritu draws a clutch of stellar turns from Andrea Riseborough (as the leading lady Thomson may or may not have got pregnant), Zach Galifianakis (in subtle, restrained mode as Thomson’s loyal producer) and Amy Ryan (as Thomson’s estranged wife, a voice of calm reason in a topsy-turvy world). But two supporting performances stand out. Emma Stone is raw and real as Riggan’s daughter-turned-PA, fresh out of rehab, keen to explain to her old man the importance of Facebook “likes” to stop him becoming a dinosaur. But, best of the bunch, is Edward Norton’s Mike Shiner, an arrogant creep of a movie actor called in at the last moment to help boost ticket sales. Be it unnerving Riggan by memorising his lines prior to first rehearsal or drinking real gin instead of water on stage or hitting on his co-star (Naomi Watts), Norton (a Method actor playing a Method actor) does for Birdman what Ben Affleck did for Shakespeare In Love — gives it a swift kick up the arse. When he temporarily moves out of the spotlight towards the end, the film misses him, but not before a couple of quiet balcony scenes with Stone that are among the most memorable in the picture.

Happily, for a film about the theatre, Birdman isn’t the slightest bit stagey. Lubezki’s work here makes that shot from Children Of Men feel like MTV, tricking us into believing the movie is unfurling in one long, sinuous take even though the action takes place over several weeks and in various locales. From the point where we see Riggan levitating in his dressing room, it is half an hour before there is another discernible cut. The level of artistry and planning is immense, but this isn’t empty gimmickry. Lubezki’s camera is alert and alive, following Keaton around so you feel at the centre of Riggan’s crucible. The long takes — seamlessly stitched together by editors Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione — also inform the film’s dialogue between stage and screen acting: while the actors are clearly acting for a camera, the duration of shot gives the performances the sustained intensity of theatre, the best of both worlds. Iñárritu also isn’t above throwing a little gag into the mix. The score, by Antonio Sanchez, is a percussive jazz effort that seemingly propels Lubezki’s camera along, but at one point the camera slyly reveals Sanchez playing the drums in a corner. Mel Brooks would be proud.

Interestingly, jazz drumming is the score of choice for another 2015 awards contender, Whiplash, but Whiplash never finds the cinematic fireworks that Iñárritu whips up here. This is filmmaking that’s at once planned to a tee but feels improvised, free-form. You can take the film’s full title, The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance, in many ways, be it on a first-base plot level — Riggan’s journey does degenerate towards a certain kind of success — or more broadly, that the creative process, stumbles, setbacks and all, can often be joyous. Yet it is hard not to take it on a broader level. Iñárritu, Lubezki et al tear up the rulebook, forget what they know and just play. The result is extraordinary.

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Birdman : A Giddy Fantasia of Broadway (and Superheroes)

Director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and cinematographer Emanuel Lubezki deliver one of the year's best—and oddest—films.

A movie star who left millions on the table when he declined to reprise his lead role in a 1990s superhero sequel? You might reasonably guess that I’m referring to Michael Keaton, who turned down $15 million when he bailed on the Batman franchise during its (first) heyday. But no, I’m referring to Riggan Thomson, who quit the role of the flying, feather-clad crusader, Birdman, around the same time. The principal difference between the two is that unlike Keaton, Riggan is a fictional character, the protagonist in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film, Birdman . And he is played, not at all coincidentally, by Michael Keaton.

Nor is that the end of the superheroic in-jokes embedded in Iñárritu’s gonzo, tour-de-force black comedy. At times Riggan is literally haunted by his old Birdman role, which speaks to him in a deep rasp (also performed by Keaton) conspicuously reminiscent of that of his Dark Knight successor Christian Bale. At one point in the film, Riggan finds himself obsessing about George Clooney—yet another old Batman—and in particular about the square jaw that his bat-cowl showed off to notable effect.

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An illustration of a man looking at a woman who is falling into pieces.

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Games Boys Play

After years of wallowing in post-stardom obscurity, Riggan has decided that the best way to reintroduce himself to the world is to write, direct, and star in a loose, arty Broadway adaptation of the Raymond Carver short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love . But this is no easy task. Riggan’s most immediate problem is that just a few days before the show’s premiere, one of his costars is hospitalized after being hit during rehearsal by a light falling from the rafters. With the help of his lawyer/producer/best friend, Jake (Zach Galifianakis), Riggan runs down a list of possible replacements: Michael Fassbender? On the hook for another X-Men . Jeremy Renner? Busy being an Avenger. Riggan, who had the skies to himself back in his Birdman days, quickly discovers that in contemporary Hollywood there’s hardly an actor working who isn’t working in lycra. So he opts to go in another direction, hiring a renowned stage thespian named Mike Shiner. This crown prince of Broadway is, naturally, played by Edward Norton ... who just a few years back was the star of The Incredible Hulk .

Given all these nods, what is surprising about Birdman is that it is only peripherally a satire of the current superhero spate. Iñárritu’s odd and ingenious film is far more interested in poking fun at the pretensions of New York theater: the brittle actresses (the other costars of Riggan’s show are played by Naomi Watts and Andrea Riseborough); the overweening male egos (Riggan’s own and, especially, Mike’s); the backstage romances; the clap-at-whatever-you-give-them audiences; and the poison-penned New York Times critic (Lindsay Duncan) eager to demonstrate how easily she can “kill” Riggan’s play with one vicious review. On top of these theatrical intrigues, Riggan is also trying to be a better father to his recently rehabbed daughter, Sam (Emma Stone), and something other than a self-involved jerk to his ex-wife, Sylvia (Amy Ryan).

If that weren’t enough on his plate, Riggan must contend with the possibility that he might actually be a superhero . When he hears that Birdman voice in his head, he turns into a middle-aged-man version of Carrie White , telekinetically spinning objects through space or hurling them into walls. Indeed, when we first meet Riggan in his dingy dressing room, he is levitating lotus-style in his tighty whiteys. Later, we’ll see him swoop across entire city blocks and blow up cars with a snap of his fingers. And that actor who needed replacing after being hit by a falling light? He was someone Riggan wanted to get rid of anyway. “That wasn’t an accident,” he confides to Jake. “I did that.”

Is Riggan’s body the vessel for some powerful extraterrestrial force? (More than once we see a fiery meteor blazing across the sky.) Did he somehow absorb the energy of a thousand jellyfish stings? (This possibility is a little hard to explain briefly.) Or is Riggan merely losing his mind? That voice in his head, the angry Bale-rasp of his former self, does seem to carry more than a whiff of grandiose delusion. “You tower over these other theater douchebags," it growls. "You're a movie star.... You are a god.”

Whether or not Riggan is in fact possessed of divine abilities—Iñárritu offers contradictory clues along the way— Birdman puts on clear display the indisputable superpowers of its cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. Forget the legendary Steadicam tracking shot into the nightclub in Goodfellas . Prepare to yawn at the glorious crane work in the opening of Touch of Evil . Even Lubezki’s own spectacular sequences in Children of Men and Gravity can’t prepare you for what he and Iñárritu have cooked up here: an entire feature film that appears to consist of one long continuous take. (It doesn’t—careful viewers will spot seams here and there—but it is an astonishment nonetheless.) Unlike its clearest antecedent, Hitchcock’s faux single-take in 1948’s Rope , Birdman doesn’t confine its action to a single studio set. Instead, Lubezki’s camera veers and swoops as it follows characters through the backstage warrens of Broadway’s St. James Theater (which resembles a shabbier, subterranean version of Barton Fink ’s Hotel Earle), onto the stage, into the audience, up on the roof, out onto the streets of Times Square, and upwards into the sky itself. Lubezki won his first Oscar last year for Gravity ; with Birdman he’s placing a very strong bid for a second.

Befitting the errant, bravura visuals, Birdman is a film in which almost nothing is adequately tethered. Riggan is coming gradually unglued as we watch, torn between ambition and exhaustion, the potential glory of artistic success and the easier consolations found inside a whiskey bottle. (There are echoes of the fraying realities of the fictional directors played by Steve Buscemi in Living in Oblivion and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche, New York .) Members of Riggan’s cast and family pinball off of him—more often than not, to restless drum riffs by Antonio Sanchez—but they rarely dent his narcissism. Even the film itself has a vaguely schizoid feel to it: part sex farce, part Broadway satire, part magical-realist fable, part rumination on celebrity in the age of social media.

In the midst of this madness, Keaton delivers a relatively subtle, subdued performance. And while he carries the film admirably, the role is nonetheless somewhat unsatisfying. Though Riggan is onscreen for the vast majority of the film, large holes remain in the character. (We’re given very little sense, for instance, of what he’s been doing in the 20 years since his Birdman incarnation.) It’s a vagueness that seems deliberately engineered: In the climax of his play—of which we witness multiple iterations—Riggan laments that he is vanishing altogether. But however deliberate, this hazy quality renders him remote, more concept than character.

The same might be said of Norton’s supporting role as Mike, I suppose, but the actor embodies him with such relish and dynamism that it’s hard to look away. A ball of furiously compressed Method artistry, Mike insists on drinking real gin onstage and attempts to have actual sex with Watts in the midst of one performance. (Without an audience, we discover, he is rendered impotent.) His devout self-admiration and practiced contempt for Hollywood—“Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige,” he lectures Riggan—are among the chief delights of the film. In addition to being the movie’s most magnetic performance, Norton’s role also serves as a self-deprecating joke about the actor’s own widespread reputation for uncompromising perfectionism. (It was this trait that reportedly led Marvel Studios not to invite him back to reprise his Hulkhood in The Avengers .)

Galifianakis and Stone (especially) are both strong, as Riggan’s business partner and daughter, respectively. Watts, Ryan, and Riseborough take advantage of the limited opportunities afforded to them by the script (credited to Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, and Armando Bo). And Duncan is terrific in the small (and moderately absurd) role of the Times critic Tabitha Dickinson. A giant of the contemporary stage, she is an actress it would be nice to see onscreen more often.

The true stars of the movie, however, are Iñárritu and Lubezki, who pack their film with dizzying (at times literally) style and verve. Whether there’s much substance percolating below the surface is an open question—I tend to think not—but after the almost bullying profundities of Iñárritu’s 21 Grams (which I liked nonetheless) and Babel (which I did not), this moral reticence comes almost as a relief. Birdman —I should probably note here that the full title is the punctuationally ridiculous Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance )—is a giddy fantasia of themes and genres, and if not all of them fully cohere, then so be it. As the Birdman voice inside Riggan’s head reminds us, sometimes viewers crave pure entertainment, not just “talky, pretentious, philosophical bullshit.”

clock This article was published more than 9 years ago

‘Birdman’ movie review: Michael Keaton winks as a comeback comes full circle

In “Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance,” Michael Keaton plays an actor named Riggan Thomson, who first appears hovering several inches above his dressing room floor, deep in meditation. He’s trying to ignore the voice of the title character, his alter ego, who takes the form of the comic book character he once played and whose superpowers he now seems able to conjure at the drop of a black leather cowl.

“How did we end up here?” Birdman growls in a sotto-voce whisper. “This place is horrible.” After a few more profane put-downs, “this place” is revealed to be backstage at New York’s St. James Theatre, where Thomson is directing and starring in an ambitious — and no doubt profoundly ill-advised — adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story. As if that bid for artistic legitimacy isn’t freighted enough, Thomson also is trying to grapple with the personal life he neglected for years while pursuing fame in Hollywood, including his fractured relationship with his daughter, Sam (Emma Stone), a new girlfriend (Andrea Riseborough) and his ex-wife, Sylvia (Amy Ryan), who pops in and out of his preparations for opening night like an even-tempered, clear-thinking visitor from another, far more self-aware planet.

From this setup alone, "Birdman" has all the trappings of a deliciously tawdry backstage satire on a par with " All About Eve " and " Sweet Smell of Success ," but writer-director Alejandro González Iñárritu throws in a delightfully wacky monkey wrench in the form of a pretentious actor named Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), who's cast in the play at the last minute when a member of the ensemble is injured (with or without the help of Thomson's Birdman-esque psychic gifts). The moment Shiner appears on the scene, the strutting and fretting are kicked up a notch, with Norton gleefully, even courageously, throwing himself into a performance that showcases the subtleties of acting nuance but also makes him look utterly ridiculous as a performer of surpassing arrogance and overweening vanity.

Narcissism, ambition, insecurity and the wages of celebrity are addressed in one fell swoop in “Birdman,” which Iñárritu and his longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, have filmed to resemble one long, unbroken take — a stunt that results in a film of delicate, even balletic, grace and one that poetically captures Thomson’s own state of mind. Tuned in, hyper-aware, Thomson moves through the world on a different frequency than his peers, or so he thinks: Through just a few casual gestures — and in one eyepopping set piece — the complicated, contradictory headspace Thomson occupies becomes palpable and real. Once a superstar, now human scale, he walks the boards and Broadway streets like a hungry ghost, searching for the potency his cartoonish persona once conferred, while simultaneously trying to escape the culture of pandering and cynicism he helped to create.

As much fun as "Birdman" is to watch from a sheer technical and aesthetic standpoint, it gains untold layers of meaning from the presence of Keaton, whose own career as the big-screen Batman that launched a never-ending franchise is clearly one of Iñárritu's inspirations. As critical as "Birdman" is of the idea of the carefully calculated Hollywood comeback (and Lindsay Duncan as a vinegary critic delivers a soaring aria to that effect in one of the film's best scenes), the film manages to be just that. Keaton's performance, both as Thomson and the éminence grise hovering over his shoulder, is nothing short of a triumph — a quiet, un-showy one-man master class in humor, pathos, physical vulnerability and dimly dawning wisdom that seems always to be disappearing around one of the St. James's labyrinthine corners.

Keaton is given ample support from a lively, limber, consistently alert ensemble, including the sly, scene-stealing Norton, the impressively feisty Stone (who delivers another one of the film’s best verbal solos), Naomi Watts as the production’s idealistic ingenue and Zach Galifianakis, here almost unrecognizable as the closest thing to a straight man, Thomson’s best friend and producer. Urged along by a musical score that consists mostly of percussive drumming and snatches of classical pieces, the actors gamely hit their marks in a meticulously choreographed dance that swoops and swirls with brash, contagious brio. Then there’s the supporting character of Manhattan itself, portrayed here as a seductive and indifferent bitch-goddess who may tantalize from afar but who can swallow a man whole in less than a New York minute.

Iñárritu, whose films include " Amores Perros ," " Babel " and " 21 Grams ," has always been prone to his own brand of overworked pretentiousness. At the risk of sounding like Duncan's sour-faced reviewer, his movies are little more than melodramas burnished with the patina of arty conceits and empty formalism. But the bravura gestures work gorgeously in "Birdman," as does the humor, which playfully balances the film's most mystical, contemplative ideas with a steady stream of inside jokes and well-calibrated shifts in tone and dynamics.

At another time, the preoccupations of “Birdman” — with relevance, artifice and the meaning of mass acclaim — might have been considered merely those of the rich and famous. But as Stone’s character makes forcefully clear, technology and social media have made them germane to anyone with an iPhone and a Twitter account. With grandeur, giddiness and a humanistic nod toward transcendence, “Birdman” vividly evokes a time of equal parts possibility and terrifying uncertainty, and makes a persuasive case that, when the ground is shifting beneath your feet, the best thing to do is to take flight.

R. At area theaters. Contains profanity throughout, some sexual content and brief violence. 119 minutes.

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

I’m jazzed by every tasty, daring, devastating, howlingly funny, how’d-they-do-that minute in Birdman. Like all movies that soar above the toxic clouds of Hollywood formula and defy death at the box office, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s cinematic whirlwind will bring out the haters. They can all go piss off. Birdman is a volcano of creative ideas in full eruption. Buy a ticket and brace yourself.

The short take on Birdman is that it’s a showbiz satire. Yeah, like Pulp Fiction is just a crime story. We’re talking reinvention here. Michael Keaton , in a potent, pinballing tour de force, plays Riggan Thomson, an actor who’s fallen on hard times since playing the superhero Birdman in a trilogy of blockbusters. Sound familiar? It should. After two acclaimed turns as the Caped Crusader in Tim Burton’s Batman films, Keaton knows from what he’s acting. He knows what it’s like to fall short of the gold ring he once caught. Riggan’s creative way back in is to make his Broadway debut by writing, directing and starring in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love , a short story by the extolled Raymond Carver. It seems Carver caught the young Riggan onstage years back and sent a note on a cocktail napkin that said, “Thank you for an honest performance. Ray Carver.”

So there’s Riggan trying to be honest again by walking the tightrope of Broadway, where vultures make a meal of movie stars. It’s old news. But as filtered through the poet’s eye of this risk-taking Mexican visionary ( Amores Perros, 21 Grams , Babel , Biutiful ) and his co-screenwriters, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr. and Armando Bo, we see things fresh. As suggested by the film’s subtitle, The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance , blundering can be bliss.

The key to Birdman is in the visuals, gloriously executed by camera genius Emmanuel Lubezki, an Oscar winner for Gravity, to give us the feeling that the film is unfolding in one sinuous, continuous take. Lubezki’s work is breathtaking, especially for the way it allows the film to veer from reality to illusion and back again with no break. So when Riggan flies above Manhattan and shoots flame balls from his fingers, we too are living with the crazy-ass visions in his head. Hell, we first see Riggan levitating in his dressing room and debating with the voice of Birdman (Keaton in a lower register), who tells him he’s too good for these theater pussies.

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That leads to the introductions of other characters, all acted to perfection and all stressing out Riggan as he seesaws between narcissism and self-doubt. It’s great to see how beautifully Zach Galifianakis plays it straight and true as Riggan’s loyal producer. Naomi Watts excels as an actress in the play, as does Andrea Riseborough as the actress Riggan is shagging and Amy Ryan as the ex-wife who tries to restore balance to a conflicted man.

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Besides Keaton, who digs deep and delivers the best performance of his career, there is award-caliber work from Edward Norton as a volatile actor who drives Riggan nuts, mostly because his talent is as big as his ego. And a never-better Emma Stone is raw and revelatory as Riggan’s embittered daughter, fresh out of rehab and eager to hook Dad on social media, where quality is gauged by Facebook “Likes.”

The very real achievement of Birdman, a dark comedy of desperation buoyed by Iñárritu’s unbridled artistic optimism, is how it makes us laugh out loud, curse the shadows and see ourselves in the fallibly human Riggan. Birdman spins you around six ways from Sunday. It’s an exhilarating high. No true movie lover would dare miss it.

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Birdman Is the Very Definition of a Tour de Force

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu ( 21 Grams, Babel ) films the teeming backstage showbiz drama Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) in what’s made to look like a single take, transcending time and sometimes space, soaring off into fantasy while essentially remaining — thanks to the illusion of fluidity — grounded in the here and now. The movie centers on the fevered exertions of Riggan Thomson, a fading movie star played by Michael Keaton (he made his fortune, like Keaton, in the role of a superhero), to prove himself on Broadway in a self-penned, self-directed adaptation of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” The camera hurtles after Riggan from his dressing room to the stage (often he’s chased by his harried producer, played by Zach Galifianakis) and back to his dressing room, with glimpses on the way of, among others, a whiny actress (Naomi Watts), her hot-dog actor boyfriend (Edward Norton), and Riggan’s mouthy, fresh-from-rehab daughter (Emma Stone). In between his clashes with actors, Riggan is taunted by the voice of his old character, Birdman, who reminds him of his sorry state and how much more deserving he is than the rest of the wretched showbiz world. How the superheroic have fallen!

Birdman is the very definition of a tour de force, and Iñárritu’s overheated technique meshes perfectly with the (enjoyable) overacting — the performers know this is a theatrical exercise and obviously relish the chance to Do It Big. But what comes out of the characters’ mouths is not so fresh. In the course of the film’s two hours, we learn that Riggan wasn’t there for his daughter growing up, that he was lousy to his wife (Amy Ryan), that he has an actress girlfriend (Andrea Riseborough) to whom he can’t make the ultimate commitment. Mostly Riggan marinates in self-pity — for all his energy, he’s a tiresome character. I had to remind myself that, good as Keaton is, he has been so much freer and more fearless onscreen. Though he got rich as Batman, he made his mark as a clown; his Beetlejuice the bio-exorcist remains one of the modern screen’s most rollicking comic creations. The somber Birdman persona doesn’t connect with anything in Riggan’s or Keaton’s personality; it’s just a pretentious literary conceit. How much different this movie would be if Riggan were visited by Beetlejuice — a reminder of what Keaton was once and could be again.

We root for Riggan — how could we not? — but Iñárritu never bothers to tell us if his Carver adaptation deserves to succeed, if it’s good. The snippets we see are stilted and obvious, though the sheeplike audience is shown marveling. (Iñárritu doesn’t seem to have much respect for the medium of theater.) The film’s low point is a scene with a smugly corrupt New York Times chief drama critic (Lindsay Duncan), who pens her reviews in a Theater District bar and tells Riggan that sight unseen she’ll destroy his show because he’s a movie star — as if critics weren’t (along with everyone else) delighted to see film actors test themselves onstage and fill the houses. (Iñárritu should hardly complain about critics, most of whom were wowed by the pretend depths of 21 Grams and Babel .) The film’s bright spot is Norton, whose matinee idol exists on a level of jerky entitlement that’s positively mythic. He’s a gleeful exhibitionist and Lord of Misrule — Beetlejuice as a Method actor.

Birdman is the sort of film that wins standing ovations from audiences, and they’re not unwarranted. How can you not be in awe of the sheer physical achievement, of the intricate choreography of the actors and the camera, of the gung ho performances? When it ends you go, “Whew!” It’s a triumph of vacuous virtuosity.

*This article appears in the October 6, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

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alejandro gonzalez inarritu
michael keaton
edward norton
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Common sense media reviewers.

Excellent, mature dramedy about failure, success, identity.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Go big, or go home. And be kind to yourself, becau

All the characters are complex; they make a lot of

A man brandishes a gun. He and a woman (separately

An actor gets an erection in the middle of a play;

Frequent strong language includes "f--k," "s--t,"

Theater marquees show names for actual shows, incl

Lots of drinking. One character progressively gets

Positive Messages

Go big, or go home. And be kind to yourself, because you can be your own worst enemy. Addresses big, thorny questions about identity, failure, and relevancy.

Positive Role Models

All the characters are complex; they make a lot of mistakes, and sometimes the damage is hard to repair. But they're each aiming for greatness the only way they know how, and others are just trying to survive. The film has a lot of compassion for those who make mistakes.

Violence & Scariness

A man brandishes a gun. He and a woman (separately) stand or sit on the precipice of a building. A stage light falls from overhead and conks out an actor (his head is bloody). Actors throw fits both on and off stage, throwing things around, punching each other, and generally losing it. A gun goes off during a play.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

An actor gets an erection in the middle of a play; he's on stage in his underwear, so it's clearly evident. Another actor is shown in his underwear while getting ready in his dressing room, and another takes off his pants and is wearing nothing underneath (his behind is seen). A woman makes a pass at her co-star and kisses her. Seductive talk between a young woman and a much older man. Couples kiss.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent strong language includes "f--k," "s--t," "son of a bitch," "a--hole," and more.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Theater marquees show names for actual shows, including Phantom of the Opera . Other products/brands shown include Starbucks, X-Men, Avengers, Twitter, and Facebook.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Lots of drinking. One character progressively gets more reliant on booze to get through the day. He's also shown smoking pot while his daughter is staying with him. Characters smoke cigarettes on rooftops and on the streets.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu 's Birdman is a bold and beautiful movie that's probably best left for adults and the most mature teens. It's thorny and forceful in the best ways possible; its power lies in its unequivocal attempts to address questions about identity, failure, and relevancy. Characters fight brashly and aren't afraid to push one another's buttons. The lead character plummets to the depths of despair; he flails, drinks, smokes pot, gets vicious in verbal fights, and flails some more. The play he's producing has scenes in which a gun goes off and actors threaten each other. There's also plenty of swearing, from "a--hole" to "f--k," as well as some kissing and a scene in which an underwear-clad actor gets an erection while on stage during a play. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parents say (13)
Kids say (32)

Based on 13 parent reviews

Tw for suicide and sexual assault

Good movie- but tw for suicide, what's the story.

It's just days until the opening night of his first Broadway play, and actor Riggan Thomson ( Michael Keaton ) is beyond jangled. His horrible co-star has just been injured, and a replacement has been found in Mike Shiner ( Edward Norton ), a Broadway veteran whose "method" is founded on chaos and controversy. But Mike is brilliant -- and a box-office draw. Never mind that his girlfriend ( Naomi Watts ), who's also in the play, is increasingly on the outs with him. Meanwhile, Riggan's other co-star -- and sometime paramour -- Laura ( Andrea Riseborough ) has just informed him that she may be pregnant. And his producer/lawyer ( Zach Galifianakis ) tells him that the funding's run dry, too. All while his fresh-out-of-rehab daughter, Sam ( Emma Stone ), vacillates between hating him and needing their connection. But the play is Riggan's last hope to rise above his previous incarnation: He was once famous for playing Birdman, a superhero with a caustic tongue whose voice Riggan still hears often. And loudly.

Is It Any Good?

BIRDMAN will leave you soaring. It's what moviemaking is meant to be, if a director allows his (and his actors') considerable gifts to run unfettered by conventional wisdom, self-consciousness, or an enormous need to please. It commits all sorts of sins -- it's overlong and overstuffed and the plot is flimsy -- but is still just about perfect. The story is as meta as can be; whoever cast Keaton, a super-talent who also was once identified with a superhero character ( Batman ) and long in search of a super-project, is a mastermind. Though Riggan lives in a stylized milieu, he's authentic and familiar and desperately moving.

Pretty much everyone else is, too, from Stone -- who plays Riggan's deeply angry daughter well, with nary a shortcut -- to Norton, who's equally convincing and terrifying as an agitating actor who's best onstage and nowhere else. Music thrums through the movie, reminding us that what we're watching is as mournful as a classical elegy and as riffy as late-night jazz. And the dialogue is swift and mighty. (A perfect line: "Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige.") That the central play depicted in the movie is based on the work of virtuosic short-story writer Raymond Carver is added genius; to paraphrase the writer, Birdman is what we talk about when we talk about good movies.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about what Birdman is saying about the nature of art and artists -- and of us as audiences. What do each bring to the experiences they share?

What audience do you think the movie is targeted at? How can you tell? What messages does it convey to that audience?

How would you characterize Riggan's relationship with Sam? With his ex-wife?

Why does Riggan keep hearing Birdman's voice? What does that mean? Is he his conscience or his tormentor?

Movie Details

In theaters : October 17, 2014
On DVD or streaming : February 17, 2015
Cast : Michael Keaton , Emma Stone , Edward Norton , Zach Galifianakis
Director : Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Inclusion Information : Latino directors, Female actors
Studio : Fox Searchlight
Genre : Drama
Run time : 119 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : language throughout, some sexual content and brief violence
Awards : Academy Award , Golden Globe
Last updated : May 26, 2024

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Movie Review: Birdman (2014)

Howard Schumann
Movie Reviews
9 responses
--> October 25, 2014

“For what else is the life of man but a kind of play in which men in various costumes perform until the director motions them offstage?” – Erasmus

Once you add up the upcoming films from Marvel and DC studios, there are twenty-two “superhero” films being planned over the course of the next four years. Though decried for their paucity of artistic merit, what is often overlooked is that these films — with their depiction of a magic pretty much gone from some of our lives — are not only popular because of their enhanced action scenes but fill a void in the current paradigm saturated by a a materialistic culture that does not reflect our personal power. Of course, for those who feel their acting talents might be better utilized, these films are not their friend.

Case in point, Riggan Thompson (Michael Keaton, “ RoboCop ”) whose career in Hollywood took off with his role in the superhero film Birdman (or “The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance”), the title of the new movie by Alejandro González Iñárritu (“ Biutiful ”). Though he has played other roles since then, the only one that prompts requests for his autograph is Birdman. Frustrated with how his career has become sidetracked, Riggan has turned to Broadway for redemption. Now middle-aged, Riggan attempts to resurrect his career as an actor by writing, directing, and starring in an adaptation for the stage of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love .

Shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki inside and around the landmark St. James Theater in New York City close to Times Square, the film follows Riggan’s frenetic attempts to put the show together despite overweening self doubts and a roller coaster relationship with the cast and crew, especially his co-star Lesley (Naomi Watts, “ Adore ”) and girl friend Laura (Andrea Riseborough, “ Oblivion ”). Also in the picture is Riggan’s daughter Sam (Emma Stone, “ The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ”), a production assistant who has recently been released from rehab.

Still resentful of her dad’s absence during her formative years, Sam is very critical of his refusal to use social media as a means of promotion. “You don’t even have a Facebook page,” she says. It’s like you don’t even exist.” Iñárritu creates a frenetic pace with long shots following different actors, while weaving in episodes of magic realism that include scenes of flying and the costumed Birdman, aka Riggan’s conscience, following him with advice about making another superhero movie. “Those people don’t know what you are capable of,” he says.

When one of the primary actors is hurt during rehearsals, he is replaced by the volatile Mike Shiner (Edward Norton, “ The Bourne Legacy ”) who gets into disputes with Riggan about how each scene should be performed while blatantly pursuing Riggan’s daughter, though he tells her he can only perform on stage but is impotent off the set. The three preview performances do not go well and a meeting in the bar with the highly critical New York Times theater critic (Lindsay Duncan, “About Time”) who rails against actors and threatens to “kill the play” leaves him in a state of despair, underscored by his encounter with a street actor shouting the Shakespearean lines from Macbeth about how “tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day.”

Aside from his lawyer and best friend Jake (Zach Galifianakis, “ The Hangover Part 3 ”), Riggan’s main anchor seems to be his ex-wife Sylvia (Amy Ryan, “ Escape Plan ”) who provides him with the ego boost he so desperately needs. In its attempt to create a satire reaching for wit and originality, Birdman touches on but mostly skirts around several different themes: The inability of an aging actor to adjust to a changing environment, the nature of our true identity beyond the roles we play in life, the art versus entertainment conundrum, and the inordinate worship of celebrities in contemporary culture.

Unfortunately, despite an Oscar-worthy performance by Michael Keaton in a welcome return to the screen and the film’s engaging moments of true energy, Birdman does not pause long enough between the drumbeat of a jazzy score by Antonio Sanchez, the lugubrious strings of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony , a pseudo-profound spirituality and its juvenile humor, to say anything meaningful about any of these subjects.

Tagged: actor , Broadway , ego , play , relationship

I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.

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'Movie Review: Birdman (2014)' have 9 comments

October 25, 2014 @ 8:33 pm Giraffe

Howard, you stand alone on this one. All of your respected peers are singing the praises of Birdman.

October 29, 2014 @ 12:32 pm Howard Schumann

No, not quite all, but most. Here is a review that agrees with my view.

filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2014/08/telluride-14-birdman.html

In any event, I have to come from my experience and can’t be too concerned about what others may think, though I am always interested in (and can learn from) other points of view. There have been some highly praised films in recent years that have now been almost forgotten.

October 25, 2014 @ 8:41 pm didie

It’s not playing anywhere near me. :x

October 25, 2014 @ 9:10 pm vi-pi-en

The move is really well done. I don’t think it was made for mass audiences though.

October 25, 2014 @ 10:37 pm Thiam

Herd many pleesing things for Birdman movie.

October 25, 2014 @ 11:08 pm Kaztro

I hope this gets a wider release soon, it is the one movie I really want to see and the closest it is playing to me is almost 100 miles away.

January 25, 2015 @ 1:10 am JJ

I thought it was quirky and entertaining movie BUT nothing more. however I thought Keaton was GREAT, never better.

February 7, 2015 @ 5:08 am P.V.

Thank god for Howard. Maybe one of the few honest reviews. It would also be a much better film had it ended one scene earlier.

February 28, 2015 @ 11:23 am Howard Schumann

Thank you very much and thank God for all of us. Can’t assume, however, that all those who liked the film are not being honest.

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Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Movie Review – Birdman (2014)

January 3, 2015 by Gary Collinson

Birdman , 2014.

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Starring Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, Zach Galifianakis, Naomi Watts, Jeremy Shamos, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan and Edward Norton.

A washed-up actor who once played an iconic superhero must overcome his ego and family trouble as he mounts a Broadway play in a bid to reclaim his past glory.

Virtuoso n. pl. vir·tu·o·sos or vir·tu·o·si (-sē) 1. A person with masterly ability, technique, or personal style. 2. A person with masterly skill or technique in the arts. 3. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s direction of ‘ Birdman ’ (2014)

Birdman both is a film lover’s wildest dreams realised in one two hour film and a sharp, witty and sad commentary on all things Hollywood. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film is just as kinetic as any of the actual superhero films it takes swipes at and has an unrelenting energy and creative spark which is unparalleled by any other cinema experience of 2014. I wouldn’t go as far as crowning it the best film of the year but it’s undoubtedly one of the most original experiments I’ve seen in this, or any year.

The film takes place over a few frantic days where Riggan Thomas (Michael Keaton), a former A-List Hollywood star who had his own comic book movie franchise (the titular ‘Birdman’) is leading up to the opening night of a stage play which he has adapted, directed, and also stars. The project will make or break Thomas financially, morally, and what is left of his deteriorating mental state; his ego, taking the form of the Birdman character, is tormenting him throughout the film asking why he has sunk so low to appear on stage rather than give audiences ‘what they want’ and make a forth movie in the Birdman series.

Things get worse for Thomas when one of the play’s cast members has to be replaced after an accident and in comes Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), a famous Broadway actor and notorious pain in the arse. Many of the film’s best scenes come from the sparring between Keaton and Norton, two actors who have both been at the very top (Keaton commercially with Tim Burton’s Batman and Norton who emerged as, in my opinion, the best actor of his generation in the late 1990s) but in recent years have stayed away or been overlooked for the commercial money-making hits. Iñárritu’s films have always enabled the often formidable cast to deliver strong performances and in Birdman everyone has an equal chance to shine, regardless of screen time.

The film is Keaton’s, however, and he allows nothing to get in his way from giving the performance of his career; from the opening shot of him in his white Y-fronts with his love handles and slightly flabby physique (by no means fat but he’s not still trading on his body, unlike many leading men) to dissecting the words in his own script with Norton, to taking point-blank criticism from his recovering drug addict daughter (Emma Stone), to challenging the number one theatre critic in New York over the merits and value of Hollywood versus theatre, Keaton shows a range which perhaps he’s not been given the chance to show in any film to date.

The casting of Keaton of course adds weight and realism to the Riggan Thomas due to the parallels of Keaton’s own career, but thankfully there isn’t too much association in the film with actual comic book movies because Lord knows we don’t need to see another film about that. “They love action, not this talky, depressing, philosophical bullshit” says ‘Birdman’ to Thomas at one point.

Current box office for Birdman in the US is $24 million. Guardians of the Galaxy took $332 million. Not an entirely fair comparison, but the film’s comments are sadly true as opening weekends and box office totals is the measure of success as far as studios are concerned.

Iñárritu taps into a comedic and more playful tone than previously explored in his work and perhaps is commenting on the perception of his own career and the need to show everyone he is not to be pigeon-holed as a director of bleak, depressing ensemble dramas. I have huge admiration for his previous films ( 21 Grams is still his most accomplished work to date for me) and to see him take a change of direction yet produce a film which is every bit as captivating and engaging as this the film proves to any doubters his ability to tell a linear story paired with dazzling camerawork. Biutiful may have been linear but it was also conventional in its execution; Birdman is anything but.

Aside from a few fleeting moments the film plays out in essentially one single shot which is more than just a neat trick, although there are plenty of clever edits along the way. The ‘one shot’ makes these few frantic days feel all encompassing for there is nowhere for any character to hide and eyes are always on them; be that the theatre audience, stage hands, angry managers, autograph hunters, or us, the cinema audience. Much like the life of any ‘celebrity’, very little remains personal – unless it’s a vendetta from a theatre critic. Moreover, Iñárritu and DOP Emmanuel Lubezki (whose work in Hollywood film over the past 15 years in simply outstanding) do not keep all the action confined to one location; the camera roves around every room, hallway and inner workings of the theatre, into a crowded Times Square at night, into bars and cafes, and even to the top of tall buildings.

The camera never appears to stop and takes us on a rollercoaster ride the likes of which every other live action film this year with similar aims failed to reach. Think of the amazing camera work and seemingly unbroken shots in Gravity (which Lubezki also worked on) but add to that a screenplay and characters which are actually worth our time listening to.

If Birdman falters it’s in the lack of depth of the themes. Everything is up there on the screen but nothing is left for the audience to explore thematically; the dialogue tells us everything but leaves little to really think about once the film is over. There are a few quiet moments for reflection (a rooftop exchange between Norton and Stone offering the film’s most poignant scene of what is lost in youth and what cannot be regained) but I didn’t get that moment of utter wonderment that I got from Boyhood or Under The Skin , two films which are equally as original in their creativity but left me utterly compelled. Birdman takes us on an exciting journey but doesn’t offer anything deeper than what is on the screen.

Minor criticism aside and more than merely a gimmick, Birdman is a milestone in a narrative story telling with what can be done with ‘one shot’, the same way Hitchcock’s Rope was in 1948. Could I bestow a greater compliment than that?

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Rohan Morbey

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People like to speak about a golden era of movies—the precise dimensions of which often shift based on the generation of the speaker—when Hollywood made products that were sexier, smarter, and just generally better. Richard Linklater ’s “Hit Man” is for them.

Like its protagonist’s ability to basically change identities depending on the situation, it’s a film that knows what its clients need, shifting from comedy to romance to thriller to a philosophical study of the human capacity to change. It’s one of the smartest films in years, a movie that’s reminiscent of everything from classic noir to the smooth delivery of Steven Soderbergh ’s “ Out of Sight ” in its willingness to be damn sexy and morally complex at the same time. Don’t miss this one.

Very loosely based on a true story, “Hit Man” stars Glen Powell (who also co-wrote this stellar script with Linklater) as Gary Johnson, a New Orleans-based professor who has been assisting the police department with menial tasks like planting bugs and connecting wires in the surveillance van. When a slimy undercover agent named Jasper ( Austin Amelio ) gets suspended for 120 days for some violence involving teenagers—one gets the impression it probably should have been much longer—Gary is forced to step in and improvise on the job. It turns out he’s really good at it, convincing a sleazebag named Craig ( Mike Markoff ) that he’s a professional killer by detailing his technique when it comes to body disposal. Gary’s colleagues (memorably played by Retta and Sanjay Rao ) suggest that the mild-mannered cat lover and bird watcher should be their new undercover hit man.

Gary takes his new assignment very seriously, researching the people asking for a murder for hire in a way that makes them more likely to hand over the money. His ability to shape himself into the right man for the job could even be read as a bit of a meta-commentary on acting itself—he’s playing dress up, but he’s also doing the same kind of research and character work that Powell himself has done for dozens of roles. And, of course, Gary’s personality gamesmanship reflects his teachings about philosophy, not only in how his background allows him to read people but in how the different characters change Gary himself.

And that’s when Ron enters the picture. When Madison ( Adria Arjona ) tries to hire a hit man, she meets Ron (aka Gary) in a diner called the Please U Café—like so many choices in Powell & Linklater’s blindingly smart script, even that name doesn’t seem accidental. Ron listens to her story about her abusive husband, Ray, and he makes the sudden decision to save Madison from herself. Take the money you were going to spend on murder and start a new life. It’s only one of many beats in the back half of “Hit Man” that’s a bit morally ambiguous. What if Madison just goes and hires someone else, and someone ends up dead? So much of what follows, as Ron/Gary and Madison begin a romantic relationship, will have viewers wondering what they’re supposed to be rooting for to happen next.

That’s part of the unpredictable brilliance of “Hit Man.” So many movies telegraph their plot twists and underline their moral messages. “Hit Man” does none of that. If you asked a dozen people to guess where it was going at the halfway mark, or even where they want it to go, you’d get 12 different answers. Linklater & Powell’s script constantly stays one step ahead of the viewers, making us eager to see what happens next and often surprised by what unfolds. I’m not sure it all adds up without loose plot threads, but it’s so wildly entertaining to take this twisting journey that it doesn’t matter.

It’s also sexy as Hell. The first scene between Powell and Arjona feels like a bolt of lightning, given how rarely we see actual screen chemistry in modern movies. Hey, look, it’s two people being movie stars . Their instant chemistry becomes the foundation for the back half of the movie as what was kind of a goofy comedy shifts more into thriller and even noir, genres that allow for a bit of moral ambiguity. Without spoiling, “Hit Man” goes to some pretty daring places narratively where other filmmakers and studios would have headed for more predictable moral waters. “Hit Man” recalls noirs and thrillers in which we rooted for the leads to get away with relatively heinous acts in the name of entertainment and didn't think about the repercussions.

That last thought might make “Hit Man” seem like little more than a lark. It’s not. This film will be underrated in its complexity, a study of how easy it is to become what we pretend we are. It’s about how we like to define people by their jobs, or even if they’re a cat or dog person, but one of the great things about humanity is our ability to surprise even ourselves. (Powell is SO good at selling the improvised choices that Gary makes in a way that's essential to the film's success.) It’s a deceptively well-made flick that appears to be Linklater in little more than his “let’s have fun” mode. But it can’t keep one of the smartest filmmakers of his generation from elevating everything that this movie is trying to do with remarkable depth.

The truth about “Hit Man” is that the golden era people long for would have made this movie a smash, the kind of hit that turns Glen Powell and Adria Arjona into household names. That's what I miss in that I sometimes wonder if some of my favorite movies of the past would even be noticed by the content algorithm in 2024. This one is getting a brief theatrical run before landing on Netflix, where good films too often get buried. Don’t let that happen here. Or they really won’t make this kind of movie anymore.

In limited theatrical release tomorrow, May 24 th . On Netflix on June 7 th .

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Hit Man (2024)

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Glen Powell as Gary Johnson

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Demi Moore, Selena Gomez, Anora , more emerge as potential Oscar contenders out of Cannes

Zoe Saldaña, Jesse Plemons, and Sean Baker's drama about a New York City stripper have all amped up their awards season profiles with stunning runs at Cannes.

From the peaks of Sundance to the coast of France, major 2025 Oscar contenders are funneling into the awards race from all corners of the earth.

Though Cannes , the globally renowned French film festival, drew to a close last weekend, its legacy has only just begun. From anointing the rise of prospective acting nominees to laying the foundation for strong campaigns for its top award-winning films in the competition, Cannes produced a range of potential Oscar nominees to keep an eye on in the coming months.

Courtesy Cannes Film Festival (2); Albert Watson/AMPAS

Cannes has a long history of shepherding Oscar contenders into the race, from recent acting and directing players (Isabelle Huppert in Elle , Pawel Pawlikowski for Cold War , Spike Lee and Adam Driver for BlacKkKlansman ) to major Best Picture winners and nominees that also won and/or competed for Cannes' top prize, the Palme d'Or ( Parasite , Once Upon a Time in Hollywood , Drive My Car , Triangle of Sadness ).

So, looking ahead, it's natural to start with this year's Palme d'Or champion, Sean Baker 's universally lauded Anora. The drama — which stars Scream and Better Things actress Mikey Madison as a stripper whose marriage to the son of a Russian oligarch draws an unexpectedly harsh response from her spouse's parents — earned a glowing reception on the Croisette.

The project is the latest in Baker's increasingly esteemed filmography, following Tangerine (2015), The Florida Project (2017), and Red Rocket (2021), with Florida even earning an Oscar nod for supporting actor Willem Dafoe. Given the increasing influence of a Palme d'Or victory in the Oscars race, Anora is an automatic addition to this year's blossoming roster of potential Academy Award nominees — especially seeing as major Academy member Greta Gerwig (whose reach and influence in the industry increased exponentially after last year's Barbie ) served as this year's Cannes jury president.

Also in the hunt after a stellar showing at Cannes is Demi Moore 's body horror drama The Substance , which reportedly received a standing ovation that lasted somewhere between 11 and 13 minutes. The film is a self-reflexive Hollywood tale that stars Moore as a veteran actress who uses a black-market drug to create a younger, better version of herself ( Margaret Qualley ). Actors love an industry-centered narrative ( Birdman , The Artist , La La Land , etc.), but the question remains: Can budding distributor Mubi mount a big enough campaign for the film following its slated September release date? Every distributor needs to start somewhere, and this could be the company's first major film with enough goodwill to fuel a potentially successful awards season run for Moore 's leading performance.

Elsewhere on the acting front, pop star Selena Gomez won one of the most prestigious acting awards in the world at Cannes, sharing the highly regarded Best Actress prize with fellow Emilia Pérez stars Adriana Paz, Karla Sofía Gascón, and Zoe Saldaña , who all appeared in the Jacques Audiard-helmed film about a transgender Mexican cartel leader. Following Poor Things star Emma Stone 's Best Actress victory at the 2024 Oscars, Jesse Plemons also continued a winning streak for Yorgos Lanthimos -director actors, earning Cannes' Best Actor award for the upcoming Kinds of Kindness .

While Cannes acting honors don't cross over into Oscars territory as often as Palme d'Or winners in recent history, each of the performers' victories put them on a vital platform of visibility at this early stage.

Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures

The non -Cannes jury is still out on other titles that hit the festival this year, with the biggest question marks looming over Ali Abbasi's Donald Trump opus The Apprentice and Francis Ford Coppola 's polarizing big-screen return Megalopolis .

While The Apprentice might feel like a timely criticism of Trump ahead of the November election, Abbasi maintained that his project wasn't just a bunch of "liberal c--ts" painting a take-down portrait of the controversial former president — and that Trump might even come around on the film (his team is currently threatening to sue ) if he sits down to watch Sebastian Stan lead the chronicle of his early years rising through the business sector in New York City.

None of that might matter in the end, however, as critics weren't enthusiastic about the project following its world-premiere screening. Its Metacritic score currently sits at 61 based on 19 reviews, hardly a strong enough reception to warrant widespread Oscars speculation right now.

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Coppola's Megalopolis finds itself in a similar position despite the pedigree of talent involved (Driver, Aubrey Plaza , Laurence Fishburne ), with some reactions praising its grandiose spectacle, while others slammed it as a bloated, unfocused mess about an architect envisioning a utopian rebuild of New York City following a near-apocalyptic event.

Outside of the Cannes circuit, early buzz has already built for projects and performances in the hunt for Oscars gold, including Denis Villeneuve 's blockbuster hit Dune: Part Two , Zendaya 's leading performance in Challengers , and Regina King 's work as Shirley Chisholm in Shirley .

Other suspected contenders on the horizon include Angelina Jolie 's turn as famed opera singer Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín's Maria and Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga 's follow-up to 2019's Oscar-winning comic book adaptation Joker , titled Joker: Folie à Deux .

The 2025 Oscars air Sunday, March 2 on ABC . Nominations will be announced Jan. 17.

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Currently reading: The Beast film review — Léa Seydoux lights up daring and epoch-straddling sci-fi
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Few movies come as beautifully haunted as The Beast . Contrary to the title, though, the intoxicating new film from Bertrand Bonello is not a hokey horror movie. In the drab, Netflixy language of genre, it is closer to a sci-fi romance. But that still doesn’t capture this remarkable three-sided one-off: a glinting pyramid of past, present and future built on star turns in triplicate from Léa Seydoux.

That movies mislead is made clear straight away. In the opening seconds, Bonello goes behind the scenes to a green-screen film shoot. But opera, pop music and the internet all spellbind too in a story that passes through three sets of time and place. And then, fittingly, there’s artificial intelligence. Though the film is deeply human, you almost picture it as a response to a prompt thrown at ChatGPT: “Make me dreamlike, hyper-modern cinema from a story actually based on a spare 1903 novella by Henry James.”

That book is The Beast in the Jungle , the cautionary tale that one section of the film loosely adapts. The setting is society Paris circa 1910, where a character is cursed by intimations of doom. This is Gabrielle (Seydoux), married but pursued by a lovelorn old acquaintance, Louis (George MacKay).

The repressed longing and Belle Époque costumes are the stuff of the pristine period drama the movie seems to be. But Bonello also asks us to divide our attention. Because elsewhere, the year is 2044, and Seydoux is now another Gabrielle, left unemployed like most of the species by AI. Yet the anonymous city where she lives is orderly and cool to the touch. By way of fun, a nightclub reconstructs the old days, year by year. “1972” features groovy frugging. In “1980” there are stark dances to “Fade to Grey”.

An impeccable stylist, Bonello makes the music look great. He is also a filmmaker willing to come head-on at the jagged edges of modern culture. (His 2016 demi-thriller Nocturama was an uneasy portrait of Gen Z terrorism.) And so, between past and future, we also arrive in a roughly contemporary Los Angeles.

Now Gabrielle is — of course — an aspiring actor. The memory of David Lynch’s dark masterwork Mulholland Drive is knowingly conjured, but with nightmares of Bonello’s own.

At one point, this Gabrielle must deal with a laptop besieged by a cacophony of pop-ups. The film could easily feel the same: an overstuffed racket. In fact, the passage between time zones is lucid and elegant while losing nothing in raw daring. History repeats, endlessly but mercurially. Now we fear fires and rising seas. In 1910, the real floods that submerged Paris are restaged in the most oddly moving sequence I’ve seen this year.

All kudos to Bonello. Not everything works, but more than enough does. And Seydoux is brilliant. Her chemistry with MacKay has a mournful shimmer that makes real the echoing themes of loneliness. It also gives mere hand-holding a jolt of sexual energy.

Here in 2024, everyone in movies is gripped by melancholy dread about the future. The Beast has its own take on that. Change, it suggests, is mostly an illusion. And Bonello doesn’t bombard us with the desperate pleas to get back to the big screen that so many films now sneak into their messaging. Instead, this sensual, cerebral work simply reminds us what is possible when ambitious filmmakers put their mind to it — and how long the result can stay in ours.

In UK cinemas from May 31

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BREAKING NEWS: Former President Donald Trump is convicted of all 34 counts in his New York hush money trial

Review: Benedict Cumberbatch can’t save Netflix miniseries ‘Eric’ from bizarre, inconsistent tone

Jason Fraley | [email protected]

May 30, 2024, 3:09 PM

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Could Mr. Snuffleupagus help you find your missing child before he gets snuffed out on the street?

That’s roughly the premise of the new British miniseries “Eric,” which premieres Thursday on Netflix for six episodes brought to you by the letter “B” for “bizarre.”

The series follows Vincent, the puppeteer of the children’s television show “Good Day Sunshine” whose life falls apart when his 9-year-old son, Edgar, goes missing in 1980s New York City. Should he have allowed Edgar to walk to school alone? Is he an irresponsible father? And is Edgar’s idea for a new puppet named Eric the key to finding him?

Benedict Cumberbatch is arguably one of the finest actors we have going today, becoming a household name in TV’s “Sherlock” and Marvel’s “Dr. Strange,” while earning Oscar nominations for “The Imitation Game” and “The Power of the Dog.” Likewise, Gaby Hoffmann has grown up from her child performance in “Field of Dreams” (“There’s a man out there on your lawn”) to earn three Emmy nods for “Girls” and “Transparent.”

Together, Cumberbatch and Hoffmann give emotional — if unlikable — performances as the deeply flawed parents worried about their son’s whereabouts. They chew the scenery as the bickering parents blaming each other’s indiscretions for their son’s disappearance, recalling the great cinematic arguments of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” and Richard Linklater’s “Before Midnight” as they hurl accusation after accusation.

This provides plenty of red herrings for showrunner Abi Morgan (“Shame”), who cleverly unravels the missing-child mystery plot, bolstered by dynamic visual compositions by BAFTA-nominated director Lucy Forbes (“This Is Going to Hurt”). Unfortunately, the engrossing psychological-thriller tone is constantly at odds with the quirkier fantasy elements as Vincent talks to his 7-foot-tall imaginary friend named Eric.

It’s odd to have such lighthearted hallucinations juxtaposed with gritty shots of kids in danger. It would be like Big Bird appearing in the middle of “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), Oscar the Grouch at the climax of “Zodiac” (2007) or Cookie Monster at the end of “Prisoners” (2013). It instantly shatters the tension and takes us out of the suspense every time Eric appears to crack a lame joke about this serious case.

I’m assuming the filmmakers are trying to channel “Birdman” (2014) where Michael Keaton spoke to his superhero alter-ego, but there wasn’t a child-abduction plot there. It only worked because the entire movie was about Keaton creating a Broadway play to shed his Hollywood past. It would work if it were a Marvel superhero following Cumberbatch with taunts about the genre, but when it’s not Dr. Strange, it’s just strange.

In the end, the filmmakers deserve credit for tackling a timely topic, from the Elmo scandal of 2012 to the Nickelodeon scandal of 2024. They also deserve credit for deftly crafting a final episode that ties everything together from small-time criminals to citywide conspiracies. Still, no matter how hard they try, they’re working with a tone that is constantly at war with itself. It’s a show that can’t decide what it wants to be.

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Hailed by The Washington Post for “his savantlike ability to name every Best Picture winner in history," Jason Fraley began at WTOP as Morning Drive Writer in 2008, film critic in 2011 and Entertainment Editor in 2014, providing daily arts coverage on-air and online.

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Nykiya Adams shines in debut role, bringing raw emotion to Bailey's troubled life in Bird.
Arnold's film fails to explore Bailey and Bird's friendship effectively, hindered by problematic directional choices.
The use of magical realism in Bird feels like an easy way out, overshadowing potential for genuine storytelling.

British filmmaker Andrea Arnold returned to the Cannes Film Festival to present her latest feature, Bird . A harrowing narrative that contemplates the transition from girlhood to womanhood, Arnold uses magical realism to capture preteen angst with a strong desire for existential freedom. With three Cannes Jury prizes already to her name, the director aimed to dig deep into the chaos of life when violence and uncertainty are at the forefront. Unfortunately, the attempt to dissect real-world concerns from a preteen perspective is clouded by poor directional choices.

12-year-old Bailey lives with her single dad Bug and brother Hunter in a squat in North Kent. Bug doesn't have much time for his kids and Bailey who is approaching puberty seeks attention and adventure elsewhere.

Nykiya Adams delivers a great debut performance.
Arnold makes some problematic directional choices.
The film's perspective is limiting as it only focuses on Bailey's viewpoint.
The use of magical realism disrupts good storytelling.

Bird Is An Authentic Tale Of Preteen Angst When Positive Influences Are Limited

The story follows Bailey (Nykiya Adams), a smart but easily influenced 12-year-old who lives with her father Bug (Barry Keoghan) and brother Hunter (Jason Buda) in Kent. Navigating the world has been challenging for Bailey, as her main influence is a father whose new business venture involves selling a hallucinogen from the slime of an imported toad. Her mother Peyton (Jasmine Jobson) is now in a violent relationship with another man named Skate (James Nelson-Joyce), whose tick meter is always at full bar. Her “friends” consist of local gang members and self-proclaimed vigilantes who incite violence in households to protect children.

With such a troublesome childhood, it’s easy to see why any sudden disruption would cause Bailey to explode. When Bug confirms he’s going to marry Kayleigh (Frankie Box), his girlfriend of three months, Bailey is enraged and leaves to sleep in a field. After waking, she meets Bird (Franz Rogowski), a reserved stranger whose compassion for Bailey’s circumstances manifests in his selfless acts. Initially, it seems Bird is a figment of Bailey’s imagination, a fabrication designed to reimagine her life with freedom. But it becomes clear that he’s real, and Arnold’s exploration of Bailey and Bird's friendship becomes the film’s undoing.

Bird (2024)

The script makes crucial mistakes while introducing bird as a problem-solving companion.

Arnold’s storytelling initially captures Bird as a harmless do-gooder who just needs help to find his family. If that's the case, I have to question why anyone in the film isn’t perplexed enough to ask why this strange man would be seeking the help of a 12-year-old girl, at least enough to then do something about it. Conversely, if he’s as innocent as the film presents, why then would Arnold often capture him naked on rooftop edges, where Bailey can clearly see him? It’s uncomfortable either way, especially considering Bailey’s vulnerable mental state.

Arnold’s exploration of Bailey and Bird's friendship becomes the film’s undoing.

Though Bird adequately captures the world of preteen angst, I have to question Arnold's use of magical realism to solve the film’s inherent problems and Bailey’s troubles. The addition of it feels like an easy way out; capturing reality with no solution would have been more genuine. Life is complex and unfair that way, after all. That’s why Bird is ultimately a disappointment. Instead of a narrative focused on examining the mind and actions of a neglected child, the film opts for a feel-good ending as a last attempt to salvage the problematic and surface-level attempts at resolution.

For what it’s worth, Bird is well-acted and includes a stunning performance by Adams. Her ability to perform with emotion and physical rage is impressive. It’s also great to see Keoghan take on a role unfamiliar to many of his previous choices, even though it still feels as if he’s limited here. In reality, that’s an issue with the script as the film plays from Bailey’s perspective. Perhaps her limited interactions with the other characters further represents her isolation from her terrible reality, even though she’s reeling from the effects of it.

Instead of a narrative focused on examining the mind and actions of a neglected child, the film opts for a feel-good ending as a last attempt to salvage the problematic and surface-level attempts at resolution.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Bird is not worth the watch. In truth, the director’s ability to capture both intimate and grand moments through her lens showcases her dedication to sincere storytelling. Unfortunately, this body of work contains too many decision flaws, resulting in a film that leaves more questions than reasonable answers. Even after the use of magical realism steals some of the story's responsibility, it ends up playing like a surface-level examination of childhood trauma despite a profound narrative being within reach. Bailey’s story deserved better.

Bird had its premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

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COMMENTS

Birdman movie review & film summary (2014)
Birdman. The first time we see Michael Keaton in his tighty-whities in "Birdman," it's from behind. His character, a formerly high-flying movie star, is sitting in the lotus position in his dressing room of a historic Broadway theatre, only he's levitating above the ground. Bathed in sunlight streaming in from an open window, he looks ...
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
Rated 3/5 Stars • Rated 3 out of 5 stars 03/13/24 Full Review Eye C The way this movie was made is amazing, the photography is the best, but not to far are the performances, Mr. Keaton leaves ...
Birdman (Or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) review
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Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance): Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu. With Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, Kenny Chin, Jamahl Garrison-Lowe. A washed-up superhero actor attempts to revive his fading career by writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway production.
'Birdman' Stars Michael Keaton and Emma Stone
Comedy, Drama. R. 1h 59m. By Manohla Dargis. Oct. 16, 2014. "Birdman," a big bang of movie razzle-dazzle from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, opens with a winking sleight of hand. Riggan Thomson, a ...
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
I have a tendency to check user reviews on IMDb before watching a film. I was surprised to see how divided people were for Birdman. Most of the reviews were either 9-10 stars or 1 star. This made me want to watch the film even more and by the time I finished watching it, my faith in people had decreased by a little bit. Birdman is brilliant!
Birdman (film)
Birdman, stylized as BİRDMAN or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), is a 2014 American dark comedy-drama film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu.The film stars Michael Keaton as a washed-up Hollywood actor, best known for playing a superhero named Birdman, and follows the struggles he faces while trying to make a comeback by writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway adaptation ...
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 16, 2024. Michael Keaton is incredible as the washed-up, disillusioned actor hoping a Broadway play will revive his career. The black comedy plays on an ...
Film Review: 'Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)'
Film Review: 'Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)'. Michael Keaton pulls off a startling comeback in Alejandro G. Inarritu's blistering showbiz satire. A quarter-century after ...
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) - Metacritic. 2014. R. Fox Searchlight Pictures. 1 h 59 m. Summary An actor (Michael Keaton)—famous for portraying an iconic superhero—struggles to mount a Broadway play. In the days leading up to opening night, he battles his ego and attempts to recover his family, his career, and himself.
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Movie Review. Riggan Thomson once flew. He was a hero then. No, a superhero. Decked out in a beaked mask and metallic feathers, Riggan's Birdman swooped into the culture on silver screens like a glorious golden goose, making Riggan a worldwide celebrity and launching the cinema superhero genre we're so familiar with today.
Birdman Review
Birdman Review To beak or not to beak. By ... The Garfield Movie Review. 146. Type Soul Codes for May 2024. The Fall Guy Review. 254. The 25 Best Superhero Movie Villains. 437.
Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) Review
Birdman is everything you want movies to be: vital, challenging, intellectually alive, visually stunning, emotionally affecting. And welcome back to the big time, Mr. Keaton; you have been sorely ...
Movie Review: 'Birdman' by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu Is a Giddy
Busy being an Avenger. Riggan, who had the skies to himself back in his Birdman days, quickly discovers that in contemporary Hollywood there's hardly an actor working who isn't working in ...
'Birdman' movie review: Michael Keaton winks as a comeback comes full
By Ann Hornaday. October 23, 2014 at 10:29 a.m. EDT. "Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance" tells the story of an actor (Michael Keaton) struggling to mount a serious play on Broadway ...
'Birdman' Review
Birdman was written and directed by Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu - known to American audiences for 21 Grams and Babel.. Despite marketing for the film, that positions it as a black comedy riff on current comic book movie trends, Birdman is much more in keeping with Iñárritu's previous works - an art house exploration of imperfect people struggling to navigate our (often ...
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The key to Birdman is in the visuals, gloriously executed by camera genius Emmanuel Lubezki, an Oscar winner for Gravity, to give us the feeling that the film is unfolding in one sinuous ...
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Birdman Is the Very Definition of a Tour de Force
The film's low point is a scene with a smugly corrupt New York Times chief drama critic (Lindsay Duncan), who pens her reviews in a Theater District bar and tells Riggan that sight unseen she ...
Birdman Movie Review
Our review: Parents say ( 13 ): Kids say ( 32 ): BIRDMAN will leave you soaring. It's what moviemaking is meant to be, if a director allows his (and his actors') considerable gifts to run unfettered by conventional wisdom, self-consciousness, or an enormous need to please.
Movie Review: Birdman (2014)
Still resentful of her dad's absence during her formative years, Sam is very critical of his refusal to use social media as a means of promotion. "You don't even have a Facebook page," she says. It's like you don't even exist.". Iñárritu creates a frenetic pace with long shots following different actors, while weaving in ...
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Birdman, 2014. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Starring Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, Zach Galifianakis, Naomi Watts, Jeremy Shamos, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan and Edward Norton ...
'Birdman' Ending Explained
Birdman is the winner of the 2015 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography - and may have been an enormous hit with critics - but thanks to a limited release, it has taken awhile for casual moviegoers to catch the film and form their own opinions.Emmanuel Lubezki's simulated one-take presentation should give viewers an appreciation ...
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Review: Benedict Cumberbatch can't save Netflix miniseries ...
I'm assuming the filmmakers are trying to channel "Birdman" (2014) where Michael Keaton spoke to his superhero alter-ego, but there wasn't a child-abduction plot there.
Bird Review: Newcomer Nykiya Adams Delivers a Stunning Performance in
Please verify your email address. Nykiya Adams shines in debut role, bringing raw emotion to Bailey's troubled life in Bird. Arnold's film fails to explore Bailey and Bird's friendship effectively, hindered by problematic directional choices. The use of magical realism in Bird feels like an easy way ...

Birdman (Or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) review – a delirious, hallucinatory showbiz comedy

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Film Review: ‘Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)’

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Reviewed at Gaumont screening room, Paris, Aug. 20, 2014. (In Venice Film Festival — opener, competing; Telluride, New York film festivals.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 119 MIN.

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