Stunning in every way...a gripping and beautiful marvel

Rating: 9/10 (2 February 2015)

Birdman (2014)
A tour-de-force imaginative wild ride. Every aspect has been pushed just slightly into creative territory—though you won't mistake this for an art film. It's a high budget, very slick, very approachable melding of drama and cinema, the intimate and the polished slick big drama you expect from Hollywood.
I say Hollywood, but in a way this is an outsider film. The director, producer, and writer is Alejandro González Iñárritu, rising Mexican director who pulled off the impressive "Biutiful" and further back, "Babel." And whatever the astonishing contributions of actors Michael Keaton, Edward Norton and the host of others (including Emma Stone), and whatever the equally astonishing contributions of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki ("Tree of Life," "Gravity," and "Children of Men" for starters) and composer Antonio Sanchez, it is Iñárritu who makes this all gel, makes it vivid, and makes it make sense. Watch all these people over the next couple decades, but most of all watch him.
You might say that this movie suffers from over-production, from being too amazing, from avoiding truly human qualities and human issues by rising above and being a sensation. Fine. Skip it. Watch "Amour" over and over. I love those movies, too, but that doesn't leave this out. It's a great example of combining the formal elements of movie-making with interesting plot and great acting. It's true that it makes a gloss of anything tender and intimate, even if at times it seems to try for depth, but overall it does what it really intends to very well.
For those who do like astonishing camera-work, don't miss this. The film is shot as if done in one single long take, camera moving with cunning fluidity through rooms, hallways, streets, and theater spaces without stop. Ever. There are clearly times where a break is snuck in, or one is implied (the camera is continuous but the time of day is not, and we see an actor in front of us that was just somewhere else). But if a long take is immersive (that's its point, to create the sense of now and extend it and extend it so that you feel involved), this long take of a movie is so immersive it's spellbinding. For two hours.
Add the free form drumming, which at first is almost irritating in its offbeat asynchrony, and add some stunning lighting from scene to scene, and you have an elegantly jarring movie. But then you realize, with this intense acting (all extremely well done), that the script is also superb. What they are saying and arguing about and proposing to each other in interwoven ways as this ensemble cast digs in is really interesting. It's not quite glib or flashy or superficial even if the movie has pushed it all to an extreme.
Yeah, see this. A pleasure and an impressive feat.