Review of "The Kids are All Right"

Definitions of family, love and friendship all get put to the test with wit and warmth in "The Kids Are All Right," one of the year's most honest and endearing films.

Blessed with a supremely talented and natural cast, director Lisa Cholodenko ("High Art"), writing along with Stuart Blumberg ("The Girl Next Door"), has fashioned a portrait of the modern family that manages to touch many buttons without hammering too hard on any one. You get a sense of the breadth of these people.

First there are the moms -- longtime lesbian partners Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore). Nic is the responsible one, a physician who can turn to a few extra glasses of wine for strength. Jules is a dreamer, just now starting her latest career as a landscape designer. It helps the camera mightily that both women are beautiful.

And then there are their kids, the products of artificial insemination, both from the same anonymous donor.

Joni (Mia Wasikowska, far more impressive here than as Alice in "Alice in Wonderland") has just graduated from high school and leaves for college at the summer's end. Brooding jock Laser (Josh Hutcherson) seems a bit lost as the only male in the family, and he seems to want something more.

That something more, it turns out, is a father. Now that Joni's 18, she can legally try to contact the sperm donor who contributed half their genetic makeup.

Prodded by Laser, she does just that, and the kids eventually meet up with Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a freewheeling, motorcycle-riding, organic health food restaurant-owning guy who had no idea somebody actually used his essential juices for procreation.

Then comes the inevitably awkward lunch where the kids bring their newly discovered dad home to meet the moms. Nic's feathers are ruffled and she's wary of this sudden interloper, while Jules seems more open to extending the family. When Paul hires Jules to landscape his backyard, you know complications are looming.

While the moms' lesbian relationship isn't pushed full forward -- this is a family, first and foremost -- it is used to wonderfully funny and humanizing effect. Not even the moms can explain their love of hardcore gay male porn, and they do have a certain cluelessness when it comes to dealing with Laser, which they at least sense.

Cholodenko combines the many modern elements in play here -- the sexuality; the breezy California life style; Paul's organic holiness and Peter Pan tendencies -- with a deft mix of insight and cheekiness. And yet when it comes to dramatic moments -- when the fragile family extension falters -- "Kids" is as taut, touching and real as you could want.

It helps that Bening and Moore work so easily off one another -- they are your basic long-loving, long-bickering married couple, each balancing the other. Moore, in particular, lets loose in this role, throwing body and soul into a character who's both lost and found.

It's probably a bit early to muse on Oscar nominations, but "The Kids Are All Right" is certainly a worthy contender, especially in the Best Actress race. The film slips a bit toward the end -- of course, so do its characters -- but its faith in the power of family and love endures. In the truest sense, this is the best family film of the year.

Review of "Salt"

'Salt" is a smart, fast, breathless blast of a spy flick that emulates the "Bourne" films in all the right ways.

Conflicted spy with identity issues? Check. Government mind control? Check. Smash-bash car chases, sudden revelations, bureaucratic corruption, high-rise hijinks? It's all here.

The big difference, of course, is that "Salt" stars Angelina Jolie, who, thankfully, bears no resemblance to Matt Damon, and who brings a sense of sultry self-assurance to her super-spy. She's not confused, she's mad.

This film likely marks Jolie's ascendance to the top rung of Hollywood action heroes, and this is probably the first time a woman has ever been up there. Heaven knows that with "Wanted," "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" and now this, she's earned it.

Jolie brings a primal physicality to the genre -- you thoroughly believe she's clinging barefoot to the side of a skyscraper -- mixed with finely tuned acting skills. She exudes power and presence. And yes, being able to act does help in these kinds of movies, despite the Schwarzeneggers of yore.

Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a top operative working for the CIA, specializing in Russian affairs. One afternoon, a defecting KGB spy (Daniel Olbrychski) drops in and tells the CIA officers gathered, Salt among them, that he knows of a deep-cover KGB agent in America who is going to assassinate the Russian president when he comes to New York.

That agent's name, the defector says, is Evelyn Salt.

Salt, of course, denies any such thing, and immediately becomes concerned that someone is going to harm her scientist husband (August Diehl). But her superiors at the CIA (Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor) want to interrogate her immediately.

Forget that, she says. So she breaks out of headquarters, and the chase begins.

Director Phillip Noyce is an old hand at spy movies (he made both "Patriot Games" and "Clear and Present Danger" in the '90s), but here he steps up his rhythms (again, likely inspired or prodded by the "Bourne" films). The action sequences are elaborate, but not overlong, and the pauses in between offer just enough context and logic.

"Salt" has more than its fair share of surprise twists; and in truth most of them aren't all that surprising, but they are logical and well-prepared and thus effective. The biggest bang comes just before the end, with Jolie pulling off a great guts-out acrobatic assassination. Nice.

With a run time of 100 minutes, "Salt" doesn't overplay its hand or overstay its welcome. It comes running right at you, slaps you around a bit, and then keeps running (by the way, Angie's grunts and moans as she runs are darling; it's the little things that give a character life).

The film ends with sequel written all over it, and as sequels go, we could do a lot worse. Strange as it sounds, "Salt" is sweet.

Review of "Dinner for Schmucks"

"Dinner for Schmucks" is pure, tasteless slapstick silliness with little on its mind beyond cheap yuks.

And it gets those yuks, even if it does go on a bit too long. Based on the French film "Le Diner de Cons," the movie revels in idiocy and quick one-liners, as well as a certain sense of meanness that stays just this side of funny.

Remember, the French idolize Jerry Lewis, a fact that is very relevant here. Fifty years ago this would have been a perfect vehicle for the rubber-limbed Lewis, who specialized in playing imbeciles.

Luckily, here in the 21st century there are still plenty of imbeciles, and Steve Carell is completely capable of channeling the stupidity needed for "Schmucks."

Playing the straight man to Carell's fool is Paul Rudd as Tim.

Tim is on the verge of a major raise at work when the company's big boss invites him to a special dinner: It turns out that the company's top honchos meet once a month to dine with the dumbest people they can find, so they can ridicule them. Tim is told he has to find a schmuck to bring to dinner.

Tim is appalled by the idea, but he wants to get the promotion and impress his girlfriend (Stephanie Szostak). And it seems like fate is on his side when he suddenly (and literally) runs into Barry (Carell), a doofus who collects dead mice and then dresses them up in costumes, placing them in idyllic dioramas.

Barry is so imperfect that he's perfect for Tim's needs. He's the sort of guy who calls the "fetal" position the "fecal" position. But after being invited to dinner, Barry decides he should bond with Tim.

Within minutes of showing up at Tim's apartment, he has driven the girlfriend away, allowed a ferocious stalker (Lucy Punch, crazy sexy brilliant) in to destroy the place and knocked Tim's back out of whack.

The rest of the movie rides on the idea of Barry being a walking disaster. Everything Tim does right, Barry manages to make wrong, with Barry always having the best of intentions and the dimmest of insights.

A lot depends on the over-the-top characters here, and they are well-played. Along with the electric Punch, there's Zach Galifianakis ("The Hangover") as an IRS co-worker of Barry's who believes he can control minds and Jemaine Clement ("Flight of the Conchords") as a preposterously self-involved artist.

When the dinner finally comes together, you've also got a blind swordsman, a woman who talks to dead animals, a ventriloquist and a guy with a pet vulture.

Craziness, as you might expect, ensues.

In essence, "Schmucks" is a mixture of classic madcap, character-driven farce with the cringe comic aesthetic of today.

Directed by Jay Roach with a lot of the same helter-skelter joke-attack energy he brought to the "Austin Powers" movies, it bowls you over with sheer silliness and then keeps tickling. Somewhere before the dinner scene it loses a bit of energy, but once the meal is served the film zaps back into shape.

Will you ponder the meaning of "Dinner for Schmucks" over late-night espressos? Not a chance. Will you laugh out loud at times while it's playing? Pretty good chance. Mission accomplished.

Review of "Inception"

With its James Bond-on-acid action scenes and puzzle-within-a-maze-within-a-puzzle mind games, "Inception" is certainly the most daring and original blockbuster of the year, as well as a visual tour de force.

If it only had a heart.

The film does have a romance, that being between a widower and the memory of his dead wife. Which may be interesting, but it's a bit hard to get much emotional traction from a memory.

Still, that chilly absence is just about all that's missing from "Inception" -- that and possibly logic. It's hard to tell just how much sense the whole thing makes, at least on one viewing.

Somewhere about two-thirds of the way through -- when our characters are racing through a dream within a dream within a dream -- such considerations seem to drift. But hey, the whole package is so giddy and dazzling it hardly seems to matter.

Meet Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a man who makes his living by entering other people's dreams and stealing secrets from their minds. Don't ask how, but writer-director Christopher Nolan ("The Dark Knight," "Memento") makes this seem perfectly feasible.

Accompanying Cobb on his dream missions is Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, finally and rightfully breaking into the big leagues), a sort of all-purpose tough guy. But when a wealthy industrialist (Ken Watanabe) offers Cobb a challenging new job, he has to put together a special team of dream weavers.

That challenge is reversing Cobb's usual process -- instead of taking information out of a mind, he is tasked with inserting an idea into the mind of a man (Cillian Murphy).

So Cobb goes in search of a generally brilliant person who will serve as the architect of the dreams they enter and comes up with Ariadne (Ellen Page). But Ariadne is so brilliant that she quickly deduces Cobb's essential weak point: He is haunted -- in his dreams and others' -- by the dangerous memory of his wife (Marion Cotillard).

If this all sounds complicated, well, you ain't seen nothing yet. Nolan eventually takes Cobb and his troupe (which also includes thief Tom Hardy and chemist Dileep Rao) down, down, down through layers of dreams, stacking concurrent adventures atop one another, building an intricate edifice of a plot that at all times threatens to tumble and crash.

If it's not all perfectly understood (or perfectly constructed), enough of it works, along with the constant chase scenes and wondrous special effects, to keep the viewer glued to the screen.

Arthur has a long, gravity-defying fight sequence in a hotel that keeps flipping around; skyscrapers crumble and fall; the world explodes around Cobb and Ariadne as they watch from a Paris café. Nolan jumps continent to continent in search of ever more striking scenery, just as Cobb jumps from dream to dream.

The cast here is any director's dream, with Nolan augmenting stalwarts from his Batman movies (Murphy, Watanabe, Michael Caine even pops up) with Oscar-level talent (DiCaprio, Page, Cotillard) and the red-hot Gordon-Levitt. DiCaprio and Page are the center, but the film still has an ensemble feel.

Whether audiences find "Inception" a bit too mind-boggling remains to be seen. And the film's dependence on Rubik's Cube-philosophizing at the cost of gut-level emotion keeps it from true greatness.

But Hollywood will be hard-pressed to produce a more ambitious and inventive spectacle this year. "Inception" proves the dream lives on.

Review of "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse"

Bella can't wait to be dead. At this point, a lot of people may start hoping she gets her wish.

Not that "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse," now invoking the shrieks of teen girls in a theater near you, is any worse than its two absurdly successful predecessors. In fact there's a lot more action and humor in this third installment of the vampire franchise, and chuckles and beheadings are good things.

But the movie still mostly consists of long mooning of romantic indecision as our flesh-and-blood teen heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) fends off the advances of hunky werewolf suitor Jacob (Taylor Lautner) while trying to convince her true love, vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson), to pin her with his fangs so they can live (or not live) together eternally.

To say this adolescent love triangle is getting draining is to understate. It became draining three-quarters of the way through the second film, "New Moon." By now it's absolutely smothering.

But then, long mooning moments of romantic indecision are the essence of the "Twilight" phenom; as deadly dull and repetitive as they may seem to some, they are the drug that keeps the Twi-masses coming back for more. This is virginal, unrequited love, burning all the brighter for its constant state of frustration.

The Herculean task of those involved in the "Twilight" films is to surround this static syrupy center with incidents that make it seem as if the story is going somewhere. All without breaking into laughter onscreen at the ridiculous dialogue and 'tween emotional angst.

This time around, the chief distraction is an army of vampires being built in Seattle -- at least they have access to good coffee -- by the evil, red-tressed Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard, who admittedly looks stunning with fangs).

To fend off said army, the goodly vampire Cullen family teams up with the neighboring Native American natural-enemy werewolf clan to protect the object of Victoria's interest, namely Bella.

To have written the previous paragraph two decades ago would have been an invitation to a mental health spa, but these days are there any teenage girls who aren't dating vampires while petting a werewolf on the side?

At least all this gives the film an ending worth moving toward, even if the moving is painfully slow at times. Vampires fighting vampires, with wolves thrown in for fun: Watch the fur fly.

The true heroine of the "Twilight" series may well be screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg (TV's "Dexter"). While directors have come and gone -- this film is ably handled by David Slade -- Rosenberg has plodded through the entirety of Stephenie Meyer's bloated novels and, for good or evil, faithfully and accurately transferred their essence to the screen.

Braver still, though, is the acting corps battling through all this ennui on the way to movie stardom. Kristen Stewart may be one of the most promising actresses of her generation or she may be trapped in amber forever as the drippy but inexplicably ultra-desirable Bella.

Robert Pattinson has a sly style onscreen, but will he survive being Edward Cullen? And while Taylor Lautner seems happy to be defined by his abs, will his squinting style forever inspire wolf howls?

They are all trapped within the phenomenon of "Twilight," and "Eclipse" will only further close the trap, leaving fans elated while the rest of the world looks on faintly stunned.

"Eclipse" is both the movie it intends to be and the movie its audience demands. What does it say, though, when true love requires fangs and fur?

Review of "I Am Love"

Overblown, European, operatic, indulgent, patently absurd and somewhat wondrous, "I Am Love" works for one reason and one reason alone: Tilda Swinton.

What is an Oscar-winning, British-born, Scottish-living, red-haired eccentric doing in an Italian art movie about lust and loneliness? Saving it from becoming a cliché and transforming it into an oddly compelling experience.

Swinton plays Emma Recchi, the Russian-born wife of a wealthy Italian industrialist and mother to his three grown children. At first she's a downright regal figure, assured and perfectly porcelain.

But after she meets a young chef (Edoardo Gabbriellini) who is a friend of her son, the cracks begin to show in her façade. Out shopping one day, she sees the chef walking. Cue a modern classical soundtrack and suddenly you're watching "Cougar Hunt."

Soon the chef is her lover. Meanwhile, her husband and son have decided to sell the family business for the best of reasons -- money -- and her daughter has become a secret lesbian. So European.

Writer-director Luca Guadagnino's camera seems to caress every cobblestone street and aging church while also celebrating the absurdly lavish dinner parties the family hosts, offering great (if not terribly subtle) contrast to the simple chef's love of fine food. The film's sexiest scene involves Swinton eating prawns -- all reality dims around her as she tastes her lover's work and becomes consumed by his art.

It's nuts, but Swinton, who produced and developed this film over a number of years, makes it work. And in her final moment on camera -- shivering and shell-shocked at the turns in her life -- you have to admit: She may or may not be love, but she sure is something.

Review of "The Last Airbender"

Stiff, fuzzy-looking, cloddish and disastrous in nearly every way, "The Last Airbender" looks as if it could have been made by the spoiled son of a studio mogul willing to waste gobs of money.

That the movie instead comes from the once hugely successful M. Night Shyamalan ("The Sixth Sense," "Signs") is downright mind-boggling.

True, Shyamalan has been on a downward drift for some time now -- following the flop "Lady in the Water" with the ridiculous "The Happening" -- but it seemed inconceivable that he would ever fall this far.

Conceive it. "The Last Airbender" is simply stupendously bad. It never connects emotionally, offers little if any character development as it races through its ridiculous plot lines, screeches to a halt with little resolved and looks absolutely awful.

It would be easy to blame its visual shame on lousy 3-D effects, and they are indeed bad, but this movie would have looked artificial and constructed no matter what. The sets look every bit as false as they are, the special effects are mundane for the most part, and the costuming is downright embarrassing.

This matters mightily since the story and dialogue are so stilted and absurd they elicit repeated laughter when no humor is intended.

Some of this, no doubt, has to do with the live-action film's anime-inspired cartoon roots (Shyamalan adapted the movie from a popular Nickelodeon series). But by scrunching a season's worth of story elements into less than two hours, Shyamalan has managed to make a movie about magic that is wholly lacking in magic.

The film begins on some vast plain of ice where a teen boy, Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), and his younger sister Katara (Nicola Peltz) are hunting. Noticing something beneath the ice, they decide to hammer away at the very thing that's supporting them. Guess what? It cracks.

Up from beneath the ice rises a giant ball, which opens to reveal a young boy with tattoos on his head alongside what will turn out to be a giant flying beaver of sorts with horns.

It turns out the boy, Aang (Noah Ringer), has been missing for a hundred years and is the last Airbender of the film's title. In this world, different tribes have the ability to manipulate elements -- fire, water, earth -- and he's the last of the wind whippers.

Which makes him very valuable, and soon bad Fire types -- they are currently dominating and destroying the world -- are out to capture the Airbender as he sets off to both learn how to manipulate the other elements and foment rebellion with Katara and Sokka by his side.

OK, it's all ridiculous, but no more so than your standard "Star Wars"-derivative hocus-pocus fantasy. It's the somber approach to this silliness as well as the myriad technical difficulties that doom the film.

In the end you neither believe nor care about any of these characters. When a white-haired princess (don't ask) sacrifices herself to the greater good near the end of the film, it has all the emotional impact of someone dropping a paper clip.

This is supposed to be the first installment of a trilogy. Please, heavens, let this truly be "The Last Airbender."

Review of "Cyrus"

"Cyrus" is one of those delightfully weird films that turns out to be more delightful than weird even as it walks a fine line that would scare off most filmmakers.

Luckily the Duplass brothers, writer-directors Mark and Jay, are not most filmmakers. They are far-indie auteurs bringing a "what the heck" sensibility to their first mainstream movie; and to their great credit, they go just far enough without going too far.

The basic premise is this: John (John C. Reilly) has been lonely for years now, ever since breaking up with his ex-wife Jamie (Catherine Keener), who remains his best friend and somewhat reluctant confidante.

When Jamie drags a reticent John to a party one night, hoping he'll hook up with a woman, the unthinkable happens: He gets drunk, melancholy and rowdy and somehow ends up going home with the beautiful Molly (Marisa Tomei).

John can't believe his luck -- he's found the woman of his dreams. And then he finds out about Molly's son, Cyrus.

Cyrus (Jonah Hill) is a roly-poly live-at-home young grown-up who fancies himself a new age musician. And he is very, very close to his mother. They go to the park every day and take pictures together. On picnics, they end up rolling around in the grass, tickling one another.

John thinks this is weird. He asks for Jamie's input and she confirms, yep, it's weird. But not that weird. Cyrus is Molly's only child; they are all each other has had for a long time. Of course they're close.

But soon enough John realizes that Cyrus is out to sabotage his relationship with Molly, and Molly can't see the monster lurking within her own child.

Don't worry, no butcher knives appear here. The Duplass boys are out for edgy comedy. Still, it's not every day you see mainstream romantic comedy colored with hints of incest. The ghost of Oedipus haunts the laughs here.

Happily "Cyrus" gets just about everything right, pulling back just when you think the "yuck" factor may take over, painting its characters in human tones of desperation and competition. It's easy to feel sorry for lonely John at first, but then eventually the loneliness facing Cyrus becomes clear.

The truly lost character in all this is, of course, the deluded or just plain blind Molly, who can't tell Cyrus is playing her. Sweet as she is -- and no one is sweeter than Tomei when she turns on the dazzle -- it's still apparent that whomever wins her heart is also winning a somewhat troubled psyche.

Warm-hearted without becoming fuzzy, "Cyrus" is very much in keeping with previous little-seen but much-praised Duplass works such as "The Puffy Chair" and "Baghead." Character-driven, filled with the shaky close-up camerawork they love, improvised and crystal clear while still often leaving things unspoken, it is one of those rare conscious and successful marriages of indie spirit with mainstream talent.

"Cyrus" is a decidedly small film, but also a decidedly good one, the sort of movie that lets you know, yes, there are fine movies yet to come and, unbelievably, new talent and ideas to be enjoyed. Wish it success.