Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

In the oddly punctuated "Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)," Michael Keaton plays a Hollywood has-been named Riggan Thompson taking one last stab at seriousness as a Broadway hyphenate, pouring the last drabs of his comic-book movie fortune into a Raymond Carver adaptation and watching - with half desperation, half resignation - as it threatens to crumble before opening.

Fury

You may be forgiven for wondering whether time has stopped during David Ayer’s “Fury,” a fun-free zone and a compendium of stock characters and war-movie clichés.

Web Junkie, St. Vincent, Whiplash, Kill the Messenger, The Judge

Web Junkie

St. Vincent



Whiplash

Kill the Messenger

The Judge




Terrific performances by Jeremy Renner, Robert Duvall and Robert Downey, Jr. highlight a mixed week at the movies:

The Blue Room, Lilting, The Little Bedroom

The Blue Room

The Little Bedroom

Lilting

It's been a weak year at the art house, especially for foreign films.

The Good Lie

A rather bad lie precedes "The Good Lie" into theaters: its misleading advertising campaign, which suggests a Sudanese "The Blind Side" with Reese Witherspoon in the Sandy Bullock part of the white savior.

Gone Girl

The movie of Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” might have worked – at all – if even one of its characters behaved in a remotely believable way, if director David Fincher showed an ounce of respect for his audience’s intelligence, or if he invested a single female character with a trace of likability or dimension. There have been worse, less watchable films this year, but perhaps no bigger disappointment.

Men, Women & Children

Jason Reitman's "Men, Women & Children" aims to elucidate the dissonance between the copacetic personae we craft online and our true, emotionally damaged selves - the same terrain farmed in last year's "Disconnect."