Critics reviews

Lubezki, an uncommonly gifted director of photography who has established himself as one of the major figures of contemporary international cinema, was an essential influence on the film. Iñarritu's legitimate claim to being the creative father of Birdman aside, and whatever Keaton or its screenwriters brought to the project, Birdman feels, from start to finish, like an Emmanuel Lubezki film.

I've never cared much for González Iñárritu's films; they always seem too close to their influences. Still, Birdman seems to me a fascinating example of how traditions can be revisited, or at least repackaged. I can also appreciate the skill with which the whole affair has been brought off.

Iñárritu has taken his cinematic nightmare to the Great White Way, illuminated it with Broadway footlights, located the pathos—and the hilarity—in the New York stage, and given us a cast of nuanced and beautifully acted minor characters.

It's claustrophobic, and ferociously acted. It lives on its nerves, and in the moment; it could almost be taking place in a single breath.

I took exactly nothing away from Alejandro González Iñárritu's A Middle-Aged Batman with Enormous Wings tale... [It's] a sort of perfect storm of things that I don't care about. (Magic Realism, Edward Norton, needlessly ostentatious camerawork, cutesy alternative titles, the creative crises of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Michael Keaton, or any alter-ego.)

The film fairly barrels along, fuelled by Antonio Sanchez's furious jazz drum score. But ultimately, Birdman is a hard movie to embrace unconditionally – it feels too knowing, too immaculately timed a display of mastery to really breathe. Even so, there's plenty to enjoy and more still to admire. Birdman has wings, for certain, even if you find the feathers sticking in your throat now and then.

Pulling this off logistically is, in a way, an example of cinematic prowess, but only in the most banal sense of the term: the virtuosity of the feat serves mainly to dissimulate the vapidity of the broader enterprise.

I applaud Iñárritu for reinventing himself tonally, and making a zany, manic film. Birdman wants to be perpetually perched – ready to fly off in any direction at any moment. The problem is that the rhythm, camerawork and acting of the film are all so pitch-perfect as to hide the fact that the message has worn thin by the end and the film risks becoming precisely what it was so intent on avoiding – namely flat and predictable.

My complaint with Birdman‘s illusory effect of taking place in one sustained shot has nothing to do with his execution, which is pretty faultless. _Why_ does Birdman need to appear to take place in one long shot? As far as I can tell, it doesn't serve any real purpose and it's not nearly as much fun as the virtuoso 12.5 minute opening of Brian De Palma's Snake Eyes.

Co-written and directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams,Babel), it's an emphatic tour de force from virtually everyone involved, and it incorporates Keaton's personal history in a way that makes it impossible not to perceive the film as his bid for resurrection... If Birdman doesn't add up to much more than an opportunity for the folks who made it to show off, that's okay. In Keaton's case, we needed the memory jog.

[It's] an overeager, conspicuously crafted art object whose virtuosity is matched only by its digestibility. Snottily sniping at everyone but the exact sort of people who will throw laurels in its path as it makes its victorious procession to the stage of the Dolby Theater in March, Birdman is as hybridized and compromised as its hero: an award-courting schmoozer that disingenuously sings the praises of difficulty.

The approach to what's sometimes called magical realism here is both slightly reverential and more than a little farcical. The antic quality that I found to be sustained throughout, up until an ending I didn't think "worked" but was too exhilarated overall to get too hung up about, is the reason I find Birdman to be one of my top moviegoing experiences of 2014.