Sixtyish actor Riggin Thomson (Michael Keaton) hates that he is remembered only for a comic-book movie hero, Birdman, that made him a star decades earlier. He figures that headlining and directing a Broadway play based on a Raymond Carver story will convince the world of his serioso chops. But when nearly everything goes wrong in previews, Riggin realizes he can trust only the Birdman voice in his head. Assembling a dynamite¹ cast (Edward Norton, Naomi Watts², Zach Galifianakis, Emma Stone) and employingGravitycinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki to shoot the two-hour story as if it were one continuous take, director Alejandro G. Iñárritu turns a familiar backstage dramedy -- say,All About EveplusAll That Jazztimes Fellini's8½ -- into a spec-technical tour de farce³. Keaton, who played Batman in two Tim Burton movies, locates Riggin's frantic⁴ weariness, which could sag⁵ into suicidal defeat or ascend⁶ into mad apotheosis⁷. Not to worry: the actor and the movie end up soaring.

 

Passengers board a flight for which they have all received free tickets. Slowly they realize that their mysterious benefactor⁸ is a man named George Pasternak, whom each of them had wronged in some way -- and that he is in the cockpit about to crash the plane. A hijacking⁹ story with a weirdly¹⁰ effervescent tang, this is the first of six short fables¹¹ in an omnibus comedy from Argentinian writer-director Damián Szifron. Animosity simmers and boils hilariously¹² in episodes set in a roadhouse diner, on the open highway, in a DMV office, among the corrupt¹³ members of a rich family and at a wedding ceremony where the bride learns her new husband has had affair with one of the guests. Produced by Pedro Almodóvar, and playing like a volume of short stories somehow coauthored by Ambrose Bierce and Roald Dahl,Wild Talesbuilds recognizable grudges¹⁴ into tales of apocalyptic¹⁵ revenge. It's also the year's most fearlessly funny film.

 

 

Calling himself Citizenfour, Edward Snowden sent encrypted email messages to doc filmmaker Laura Poitras that hinted at extraordinary revelations about the National Security Agency's database on U.S. citizens. In a Hong Kong hotel room in June 2013, the Booz Allen IT analyst¹⁶ met Poitras and journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill to spill his and his computer's guts¹⁷. The subject of this fascinating, edifying¹⁸ and creepy film has a nerdish star quality: poised¹⁹ and articulate, he's also more than a little anxious. Snowden correctly anticipates what's in store for him -- official pariah²⁰ status in the U.S. -- and makes clear that the need for the public to know the range of NSA eavesdropping²¹ is worth the price he will pay. The glare of Poitras's camera gives the young man a ghostly pallor; he could be a specter reaching out from the other side to warn the living. A true-life spy thriller²² and horror movie,Citizenfouris also history in the making: a portrait of a man at the very moment he chooses to enrich and darken Americans' understanding of what their government knows about them.

 

 

"Think of our news," says a producer at an L.A. TV station, "as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut." Lou Bloom, a freelance news cameraman played by Jake Gyllenhaal with the smiling stare of a deranged²³ Boy Scout²⁴, takes that advice and shoots video of grieving widows, home-invasion casualties and human roadkill. You want to see this stuff, up-close and purple, do you not? Lou's the guy who gets it for you. Imagine Travis Bickle fromTaxi Driverworming his way into Paddy Chayefsky'sNetworkand you have writer-director Dan Gilroy's '70s-going-on-right-now mix of psychological portrait and media satire²⁵. Prowling an after-dark L.A. brought to gorgeous, menacing life by ace²⁶ cinematographer Robert Elswit, Gyllenhaal ratchets down his usual fretful-puppy winsomeness²⁷ to create an ornate, eloquent²⁸ vessel²⁹ for Lou's hollow charm, careering zeal³⁰ and pestilential value system.

 

 

In sweeping³² gestures and urgent broken English, Alejandro Jodorowsky exclaims, "Movies have heart -- boom,boom,boom! Have mind [he mimes³³ lightning bolts from his brain]. Have power [he points to his genitals]. Have ambition! I want to do something like that. Why not?" At 84, four decades after he prepared a hallucinogenic adaptation of Frank Herbert's science-fiction novelDune, the Chilean-born Mexican director is still heartbroken that the project died when his producer came up $5 million short on the $15-million budget. A few years later, George Lucas spent $11 million makingStar Wars, and the fantasy-film genre³⁴ went retro instead of luxuriously³⁵ wacko. Doc director Frank Pavich buttresses³⁶ his profile of the still-vital and charismatic Jodorowsky with contributions from the oldDuneteam, including writer Dan O'Bannon and concept designers Chris Foss and H.R. Giger (all of whom world work on Ridley Scott'sAlien). The message to take from this love letter to the cinematic ambition of the '70s: movies once had brains and balls, and lost them.

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