Pictureland

It's a frustrated director's fantasy come true:  a light conveniently falls on a cast member's head during a play's rehearsal, putting an end to some excruciating line readings.  Putting to a merciful end, if only temporarily, the bad actor.  Suddenly, a chance to cast someone good in the hack's stead.  But whom?  Woody Harrelson?  No, Woody has already committed to the next Hunger Games sequel.  Michael Fassbender?  Nope - X-Men.   Jeremy Renner, perhaps? Sorry - he's busy with his Avengers pals.  So many super heroes, so few brave actors to be found. This is the dilemma, in more ways than one, for Riggan Thomson, adaptor, director and star of the play within the film which is Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) . Thomson himself knows something about superhero movie franchises.  The middle-aged actor played the fictional character Birdman in three films during more the more youthful and prosperous years of his...

"It gradually became clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been:  a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir."   By Friedrich Nietzsche's definition, filmmaker Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu would seem to qualify as a great philosopher of the old school.   In Biutiful , the multiple storylines of his first three features - Amores Perros , 21 Grams and Babel - have essentially been pared down to one.  But the sprawl of events, the thematic weight, the length of those earlier films remains.   Determined though he may be to shine a light on lives in crisis, Mr. Inarritu is perhaps now indulging in some of that unconscious memoir, telling us more about himself than the sorry state of humanity.      In the case, the festivities take place in Barcelona, where a kind of benevolent human trafficker, Uxbal (Java...