Out writer-director Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, starring Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as lesbian moms and Mark Ruffalo as the sperm donor who comes into their lives nineteen years later, has earned a rare, perfect 100 score on MetaCritic from ten major print reviewers: Entertainment Weekly ("warm, funny, sexy, smart"), New York Times ("outrageously funny ... heartbreaking... the thrilling, vertiginous sense of never having seen anything quite like it before"), LA Times, New York Daily News, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune ("wonderful"), Chicago Reader ("succeeds brilliantly"), San Francisco Chronicle, Slate ("a rich, layered, juicy film, with quiet revelations punctuated by big laughs"), and even the stodgy Wall Street Journal ("a thrillingly funny and casually profound film"). The one spoilsport was Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. The couple's children are played by Australia's Mia Wasikowska (who was just Alice in Alice in Wonderland and soon will be Jane in Jane Eyre) and Kentucky's Josh Hutcherson, the adorable actor from Bridge to Terabithia. If you don't know Cholodenko's work, start with the Frances McDormand movie Laurel Canyon co-starring Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale.
The Kids Are All Right opens today in Chelsea, the East Village, the Upper West Side, Hollywood, and Chicago. It expands to many cities next week, July 16, and a whole lot more on July 23. Study the theater list and support LGBT film.
I though Lane's review hilarious and spot on. Keep smugness and smog in So-Cal. Quality trumps the cheering section in my book.
Posted by: edoliver | July 12, 2010 at 09:33 AM