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

Dir: Alejandro González Iñárritu

Self-consciously clever and provocatively satirical, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is an ambitious, acid-tongued oddity. It skewers actors, Hollywood, comic-book movies, social media, and most everything else that’s populist and prevalent in our society. It fights pretension with pretension and it’s a movie that just may hate movies. Challenging but technically impressive, Birdman’s also laden with a murderer’s row of actors doing their level best and orbits around an amazing central performance from a re-ignited Michael Keaton at his unhinged peak. If nothing else, Birdman will convince audiences that Keaton may have been dealt a bum hand following his Batman heyday but (more…)