Birdman

BIRDMAN will leave you soaring. It's what moviemaking is meant to be, if a director allows his (and his actors') considerable gifts to run unfettered by conventional wisdom, self-consciousness, or an enormous need to please. It commits all sorts of sins -- it's overlong and overstuffed and the plot is flimsy -- but is still just about perfect. The story is as meta as can be; whoever cast Keaton, a super-talent who also was once identified with a superhero character (Batman) and long in search of a super-project, is a mastermind. Though Riggan lives in a stylized milieu, he's authentic and familiar and desperately moving.

Pretty much everyone else is, too, from Stone -- who plays Riggan's deeply angry daughter well, with nary a shortcut -- to Norton, who's equally convincing and terrifying as an agitating actor who's best onstage and nowhere else. Music thrums through the movie, reminding us that what we're watching is as mournful as a classical elegy and as riffy as late-night jazz. And the dialogue is swift and mighty. (A perfect line: "Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige.") That the central play depicted in the movie is based on the work of virtuosic short-story writer Raymond Carver is added genius; to paraphrase the writer, Birdman is what we talk about when we talk about good movies.