Birdman (dir. Alejandro G. Iñárritu).

Unfortunately, the most interesting part of Birdman is its breathless style, shot to appear as almost entirely one unbroken, single long take executed spectacularly by Gravity cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. This wondrous yet gimmicky construct only heightens the pretension of the entire endeavour as it balances some uniformly fine performances of both sharply satirical and deadly serious tones. It’s too bad the pretension behind the filmmaking wastes its talent all-around to tiredly mock easy targets of popular culture with some lazy, meta commentary.