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.
Iñárritu doesn't pull off all of his grand gestures and he unfortunately fudges the ending, but when this strange bird is flying it really is something to behold.
Birdman is a delicious and delirious pleasure.
As a flight of fancy, Birdman swoops gleefully on artistic tropes and tics, but it never soars.
Iñárritu ditches time-hopping bleakness for a linear, if loopy, satire that buzzes with brio. If Mel Brooks, John Cassavetes and Terry Zwigoff co-directed a superhero movie, this might be it.
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 missed.
Wildly bold, funny and oddball.
The acting is superb, but director Alejandro G Inarritu comes close to stealing his actors’ thunder with a virtuoso performance behind the camera, filming the entire picture in what appears to be a single take.
A wickedly subversive, riotously funny intertextual psycho-odyssey.
A witty riff on fame, acting, art and superheroes, Birdman delights in both plot and performance.
Despite its pretensions to be something more, the picture is most entertaining as a backstage farce.
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 will astound some and irritate others, but there’s no doubt that it’s packed full of that good old-fashioned thing films often lack: imagination.
Edinburgh Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Thursday January 1, 2015, until Thursday March 12, 2015. More info: www.filmhousecinema.com
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