Directed by Lisa Cholodenko
(R)
***
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The Kids Are All Right is the “best comedy about an American family” in a long time, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Julianne Moore and Annette Bening play a same-sex married couple who conceived two children through a sperm donor. The kids, now teenagers, are curious about their birth father (Mark Ruffalo) and track him down. Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg have written a smart script that’s “canny in its insights” and never feels like it’s pushing an agenda. Cholodenko treats the film’s homosexual marriage in a quietly revolutionary way—“regarding it as no big deal, making its impact a very big deal,” said Rex Reed in The New York Observer. No matter your take on gay marriage as a political issue, these characters “open the door to a brand-new examination of family values that leaves you charged and cheering.” The Kids Are All Right simply portrays a modern family in an “intimate, funny, occasionally upsetting” way, said Keith Phipps in the A.V. Club. Despite superficial differences, this family turns out to be just as functional—and dysfunctional—as any other.
