The Kids Are All Right

Directed by Lisa Cholodenko

(R)

***

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Sign up

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.